Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness: A Theoretical Approach with Analyses of Laclos, Kafka and Toussaint 9783110673180, 9783110664362

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Eva Sabine Wagner Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Volume 68

Eva Sabine Wagner

Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness A Theoretical Approach with Analyses of Laclos, Kafka and Toussaint

This book is a revised version of Eva S. Wagner’s doctoral thesis, which was evaluated by Wolfgang Asholt, Wolfram Nitsch and Peter Schneck. The doctoral thesis was successfully defended at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies (Fachbereich Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft) of the University of Osnabrück in May 2018.

ISBN 978-3-11-066436-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067318-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-067319-7 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932268 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

VII

IX

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Complexity

1

Part A: Theory of Narrativity 1

Preliminary Epistemic Considerations: Narrativity and Narratology Between Order and Chaos 15 1.1 On the relationship between narrativity and narratology 15 1.2 Narratology: History and status quo 17 1.3 Representation, point of view and coherence: Three core aspects of narrativity? 24 1.4 A semiotic circle and its three irreducibilities 31 1.5 The rhizome, its intricacies and its added value for narrative theory 38 1.6 Deleuzian and rhizomatic approaches in literary and narrative theory 54

2

Problems of Defining Narrativity: Research Review and Systematisation 70 2.1 The Babylonian Tower of definitions 70 2.2 The S/U problem: Specificity versus universality 95 2.3 Inner boundaries of narrativity and narratology: Rivalling dimensions 100 2.4 A new proposal for systematisation: The Pyramid of narrativity 174 2.5 Limits and blind spots of the pyramidal model 219

3

Narrativity and Coherence: Towards an Analysis of Literary Narrative Dynamics 236 3.1 Coherence: Some interdisciplinary insights 236 3.2 Narrativity in actualisation, coherence and literariness 275 3.3 Narrative dynamics: Between theory and interpretation 285

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Part B: Narrative Dynamics 4

“Narrative Projection”: Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses 295 4.1 Ambiguity: Forms and features 295 4.2 Jakobson’s projection principle and narrative projection 328 4.3 Les Liaisons dangereuses: Ambiguities and forms of narrative projection 334 4.4 Advantages and other forms of narrative projection 390

5

“Narrative Withdrawal”: Kafka’s Schloss 400 5.1 On the difficulty of writing about Kafka (today) 400 5.2 Narratological approaches to Kafka’s narratives and to Das Schloss 411 5.3 Kafka: An “antinarrative” novelist? A strange kind of emplotment 425 5.4 Techniques and effects of narrative withdrawal 439 5.5 Narrative withdrawal: Incompatible with meaningfulness and representation? 480

6

“Narrative resistance”: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels 499 6.1 Research review: Forms of resistance 508 6.2 Resistance as a narrative dynamic at the text-reader nexus 513 6.3 The slot of ‘tellability’: Rhizomatic aspects of Toussaint’s narrativity 518 6.4 The slot of ‘function’: Toussaint’s strategy of reappropriation 546 6.5 The slot of ‘literariness’: Strategies of reception 571

Concluding remarks: Elements of a ‘Rhizomatic’ Realignment of ‘Narrativity’ and Narratology 601 Works Cited Table of Figures Index

635

609 633

Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following people who contributed to the accomplishment of this book: Firstly, and most importantly, Wolfgang Asholt whose sustained interest in my work and whose constant, multifaceted support through the many years of the book’s genesis, including the frequent reading and critical discussion of countless pages, require far more words for expressing my gratitude than I could ever print here – thank you, you gave me the self-confidence and power to accomplish this project; Wolfram Nitsch, whose teaching and encouragement inspired this thesis in the first place, who regularly offered an academic platform for sharing and discussing my ideas with other students and scholars and who has always been available for feedback and support; Peter Schneck for fostering the cognitivist orientation of my work and for his thorough engagement with my thesis in defiance of its challenging length and our divergent disciplinary affiliations; Christoph König and Simone Winko for providing me with the opportunity to develop my thesis within their doctoral programme TMTG (Theory and Methodology of Text Studies and Their History); Christoph König for opening my eyes to the historical dimension of literary criticism and for his insisting on interpretation proper; Simone Winko for her regular feedback on my work and her valuable literary-theoretical input; all those scholars who crossed my path abroad and broadened my perspectives: John Pier for his insightful criticism of selected aspects of my thesis and for his multi-faceted work, which is a source of constant inspiration; Raphaël Baroni for his rewarding feedback on a prior version of my chapter on Laclos, including valuable bibliographical references; Lisa Muszynski for many inspiring and mind-expanding conversations on holistic thinking and embodiment; Andreas Heise, Tanja Klankert and Markus Wild for their wonderful interdisciplinary workshop on non-propositional knowledge, which reminded me of what joint academic work and discussion ideally can be; Isak M. Cutler-Sexson for revising my thesis; the series editors, Lydia White and Stella Diedrich at De Gruyter as well as Dipti Dange at Integra Software Services for their helpful feedback, friendly responsiveness and a straightforward publication process;

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all those friends who supported me throughout the years, especially Till Hink, who has been willing to encourage me and to discuss my ideas at any time; my loved ones, Thomas and Yaron – you are the light of my life. The research that went into this project was generously funded by the Universities of Osnabrück and Göttingen and the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Abbreviations AP B BR C CA-H CA-M D1 D2

DC

F FA LD

M ME ML RA S SB T

TM TV TVE VM

Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 1989. L’Appareil-photo. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Kafka, Franz. 2005. Briefe. April 1914–1917. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch. Franz Kafka. Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe. Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2011a. The Bathroom. Translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis. 2nd ed. Champaign, Dublin, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2008a. Camera. Translated by Matthew B. Smith. Champaign, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Kafka, Franz. 1998. The Castle. Translated by Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. Kafka, Franz. 1992. The Castle. Translated by Edwin Muir and Willa Muir. New York, Toronto: Knopf. Kafka, Franz. 1974 [1948]. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. 1910–1923. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Joseph Kresh. 4th ed. New York: Schocken Books. Kafka, Franz. 1974 [1949]. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Vol. 2: 1914–1923. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt. 4th ed. New York: Schocken Books. Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François. 1784 [1782]. Dangerous Connections: or, Letters Collected in a Society and Published for the Instruction of Other Societies. 4 vols. London: printed for T. Hookham. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2005. Fuir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2002. Faire l’amour. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François. 1951 [1782]. Les Liaisons dangereuses. In Œuvres complètes de Choderlos de Laclos, edited by Maurice Allem, 3–399. Paris: Gallimard. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 1986. Monsieur. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2008b. Monsieur. Translated by John Lambert. Champaign, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2004. Making Love. A Novel. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York, London: The New Press. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2009b. Running Away. Translated by Matthew B. Smith. Champaign, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Kafka, Franz. 1983. Das Schloß. Edited by Malcolm Pasley. Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe. Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer. 1985. La Salle de bain. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Kafka, Franz. 1990. Tagebücher. Franz Kafka. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley. Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe. Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2011b. The Truth About Marie. Translated by Matthew B. Smith. Champaign, Dublin, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 1997. La Télévision. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2006. Television. A Novel. Translated by Jordan Stump. 3rd ed. Rochester, McLean, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2009a. La Vérité sur Marie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

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Das Zwielichtige einer jeden Ordnung besteht darin, daß Ordnung Erfahrungen gleichzeitig ermöglicht und verunmöglicht, daß sie aufbaut und abbaut, daß sie ausgrenzt, indem sie eingrenzt, ausschließt, indem sie auswählt, kurz: daß Licht und Schatten ineinanderspielen. [What renders each and any order dubious is the fact that order simultaneously enables and disables experiences, that its constructions are simultaneously destructions, that it factors out as it delimits itself, and that its integrations are always also exclusions, briefly: that light and shadow go hand in hand.] (Translation mine). Bernhard Waldenfels (2013): Ordnung im Zwielicht. Munich: Fink, 163.

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Complexity J’ai découvert comment il est vain de ne polémiquer que contre l’erreur: celle-ci renaît sans cesse de principes de pensée qui, eux, se trouvent hors conscience polémique. J’ai compris combien il était vain de prouver seulement au niveau du phénomène : son message est bientôt résorbé par des mécanismes d’oubli qui relèvent de l’auto-défense du système d’idées menacé. J’ai compris qu’il était sans espoir seulement de réfuter : seule une nouvelle fondation peut ruiner l’ancienne. C’est pourquoi je pense que le problème crucial est celui du principe organisateur de la connaissance, et ce qui est vital aujourd’hui, ce n’est pas seulement d’apprendre, pas seulement de réapprendre, pas seulement de désapprendre, mais de réorganiser notre système mental pour réapprendre à apprendre.1 (Edgar Morin: La méthode. Tome I. La Nature de la Nature. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1977, p. 21, orig. emphasis)

Forty years ago, Edgar Morin, former director of research at the Centre nationale de recherche scientifique (CNRS), illuminated from a methodological and epistemological perspective a phenomenon that narratology is currently just now starting to discuss, namely the phenomenon of complexity. Considering the connection between complexity and narratology, recent research in narratology has the tendency to understand narrative as a somewhat ‘complex’ phenomenon. The corresponding approaches highlight the potential of complexity theory to renew narrative theory to the extent that it can more adequately represent particular ‘complex’ aspects, principles or types of narrative.2 My approach differs from this narratological paradigm in that it does not

1 “I have discovered how vain it is to only polemicise against the fallacy: the latter resurges over and over again due to principles of thinking, which, for their part, are exempt from polemic consciousness. I have understood how vain it is to provide evidence only on the level of the phenomenon: its message is soon lowered by mechanisms of oblivion that are erected by the self-defence system of menaced ideas. I have understood the hopelessness of mere refutation: only a new foundation can ruin the previous. This is why I think that the crucial problem lies in the organising principle of our knowledge, and what is vital today is not only to learn, not only to re-learn, not only to un-learn, but to reorganise our mental system in order to relearn learning” (translation here and hereafter mine, orig. emphasis). 2 According to Pier, researchers who establish a connection between complexity (or complexity theory) and narratology fall into three groups: “those who seek to formulate narrative theory along the lines of complexity systems [sic]; those who consider concepts and principles of complexity more adequate than those of narratology when examining at least some types of narrative; and those who, indirectly or even unconsciously, single out or evoke aspects of narrative that are compatible with certain principles of complexity theory” (2017, 540). Pier’s own approach can probably be ranged in the third category inasmuch as he singles out one aspect of narrative – sequentiality – that is compatible with a particular principle of complexity theory, namely with the “irreversibility” from the second law of thermodynamics (see 542). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-001

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focus exclusively (or primarily) on the complex properties of narrative, but rather on the complex relationship between narratology and its central key concept, narrativity. Narrativity is generally considered to denote either the defining quality of narrative or a definite number of essential properties, characteristics or formfunction pairs that would allow the question of “what in narrative is distinctive of narrative” to be answered (Prince 2003, 3). Narratologists generally consider the definition of narrativity to be of prime importance; they argue that narrative theory and narratological practices depend on the way in which one conceptualises narrativity: Unless narrative has been defined in or by its narrativity, we leave the subject matter undelimited and risk missing its generic feature(s): narratologists then become liable to do everything indiscriminately together with, if not anything but, narratology. (Sternberg 2001, 115)

But if the definition of narrativity is so important, why have narratologists not yet agreed upon a definition, even after decades of research? And how is it possible that one of the leading heads of postclassical narratology praises “the extraordinarily vital and innovative work now being done in narrative studies” (Herman 1999, 2), despite the lack of a consensual notion of narrativity? I would like to offer two possible (and closely related) answers to these questions. Firstly, narratologists frequently come up with new conceptions of narrative and narrativity. The result is an extreme diversification of the concept leading to conceptual chaos, which stands in a sharp contrast to the goal of unifying the notion. The diversification of narrativity, however, is perhaps not only disadvantageous for narratologists: where narrativity diversifies, narratology does so, too. Considered from this angle, the plurality of competing definitions indeed has “beneficial” effects on narratology insofar as it leads to an expansion of the area of narratological research (i.e., of its objects, concerns and preoccupations), thus providing narratology with new “vitality”. Secondly, as these considerations already suggest, there seems to be something wrong with the assumption that narratology can and must simply develop a consensual definition of narrativity in order to consolidate itself. Given that narratology obviously has the power to define narrativity and that definitions of narrativity in turn have the power to foster and legitimise narratological research activities, narratology is, as I have recently argued, part of a complex “feedback loop” (or “vicious circle”) in which the level of research and the level of the object of research influence or determine each other (see Wagner 2017). This analysis has raised an important question:

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Complexity

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if definitions of narrativity rely on the narratological approach one chooses and if, conversely, the narratological approach that one chooses depends on a specific notion of narrativity; moreover, if both narrativity and narratology are inordinately diversified and complex, then how can we achieve any form of [narratological] consolidation? The feedback loop underlying this question deserves our full attention, since it uncovers a threat to a fundamental ontological boundary which serves scientific objectivity by establishing ‘a rigid separation between the observer and the observed phenomenon’ [. . .], that is, between narratology as a scientific discipline and its object of research [. . .]. (Wagner 2017, 505–506)

If we cannot subtract ourselves as observers from the act of scholarly observation and if what we observe reflects, to a certain degree, our own perspectivity, how can we achieve any objective knowledge about our object of research? Moreover, how can (or should) we react to this epistemological challenge – now that we know about it – in terms of methodology? Morin provides one answer by suggesting, as quoted above, that it “is vital today [. . .] to reorganise our mental system in order to relearn to learn”. He conceives of this reorganisation of our mental system as a method of taking systematically, in a self-interrogative “loop”,3 our own conceptual blind spots into consideration and of replacing Cartesian analytic thinking with a non-reductionist, anti-simplistic focus on complex connections and interdependencies, including those between us and our objects of research: Aujourd’hui doit être méthodiquement mis en doute le principe même de la méthode cartésienne, la disjonction des objets entre eux, des notions entre elles (les idées claires et distinctes), la disjonction absolue de l’objet et du sujet. Aujourd’hui notre besoin historique est de trouver une méthode qui détecte et non pas occulte les liaisons, articulations, solidarités, implications, imbrications, interdépendances, complexités. (Morin 1977, 16)4

The alternative between Cartesian thinking and thinking in terms of complexity, presented by Morin, has also been highlighted by Capra, who identifies a general, transdisciplinary paradigm shift from Cartesian “analytical thinking”5 3 “Notre pensée doit investir l’impensé qui la commande et la contrôle. Nous nous servons de notre structure de pensée pour penser. Il nous faudra aussi nous servir de notre pensée pour repenser notre structure de pensée. Notre pensée doit revenir à sa source en une boucle interrogative et critique” (Morin 1977, 21). 4 “Today, it is the very principle of the Cartesian method that has to be methodologically queried, the act of sorting objects from objects, notions from notions (clear and distinct ideas), the absolute separation between the object and the subject. Today, our historical need consists of finding a method that does not darken, but uncovers the connections, hinges, adhesions, implications, enmeshments, interdependencies, complexities.” 5 “René Descartes created the method of analytic thinking, which consists of breaking up complex phenomena into pieces to understand the behavior of the whole from the properties

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to “systems thinking”, the latter alternatively called “‘dynamical systems theory’, ‘the theory of complexity’, ‘nonlinear dynamics’, ‘network dynamics’, and so on” (1996, xviii). Drawing on Heisenberg, Capra underscores, like Morin, that “systems thinking involves a shift from objective to ‘epistemic’ science, to a framework in which epistemology – ‘the method of questioning’ – becomes an integral part of scientific knowledge” (40). This new paradigm also brings about a new way of understanding the notion of scientific knowledge, now considered to be “a network of concepts and models, in which no part is any more fundamental than the others” (39).6 Given that “[f]or most scientists such a view of knowledge [. . .] with no firm foundations is extremely unsettling, and today [. . .] by no means generally accepted” (39), it does not come as a surprise that narratology, especially in view of its structuralist origins, has not yet performed this paradigm shift. This becomes obvious not only in the belief that we could define narrativity objectively, as if we could subtract ourselves and the disciplinary contexts in which we, as narratologists, are embedded from the act of defining; it also manifests itself in the analytical goal of drawing boundaries, for instance, “between narrative and non-narrative, [. . .] between both and antinarrative, [. . .] between narrative as entity and narrative as quality” (Prince 2003, 1) and, consequentially, between narratological and non-narratological preoccupations: I believe that [. . .] surveyings of narratology’s borders and [. . .] restrictions on its proper domain are valuable since they promote – against adhocity – methodicalness and generality, since they help to provide a well-defined object of study and well-defined (ultimate) goals for the discipline [. . .], and since they resist the (unreflective) conflation of the theoretical, the descriptive, and the interpretive [. . .]. (Prince 2003, 10)

Drawing boundaries is one goal, laying bare complex interconnections and interdependencies is another. Prince argues for the former and devaluates the latter using derogatory vocabulary, arguing against the “(unreflective) conflation” of allegedly entirely separated issues (“the theoretical, the descriptive, and the interpretive”). Nonetheless, what lurks behind Prince’s position is a concern for scholarly clarity and narratological landmarks, which I share. Without an understanding of what narrativity is, has been or can be, narratology loses its points of orientation.

of its parts. Descartes based his view of nature on the fundamental division between two independent and separate realms – that of mind and that of matter” (Capra 1996, 19–20). 6 This reconceptualisation corresponds to the new conceptualisation of nature as “complex, highly integrative systems of life” (xviii), which “interac[t] in network fashion with other systems (networks)” (Capra 1996, 35).

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Is there a way of understanding narrativity – and narratology – that evades both the fallacious order created by illusory borders and the chaos of undifferentiated omni–interconnectedness?7 Is it possible to take an (epistemologically adequate) middle path between the extremes of forged order and chaotic multiplicity, of structure and the complete dissolution of structure, of narratological structuralism and poststructuralism, of “an overly geometric schematisation” (Gibson 1996, 3) and the complete “deconstruct[ion]” (22) of narratological orders? By searching for this middle path, this study enters unknown territory and inaugurates a realignment of narratology, which seeks to explore the complexity of both narrativity and narratology. It should be noted that complexity itself is a notion and phenomenon that develops in the broad space between order and chaos inasmuch as it refers to the unpredictable, ‘nonlinear’ (and thus somehow disordered) ‘emergence’ of ordered patterns and structures, such as Prigogine’s ‘dissipative structures’, which are simultaneously constant and dynamic, stable and impalpable. This study aims, however, not at borrowing specific notions or principles from complexity theory in order to find their counterparts in narrative phenomena. Instead, it aims more generally to explore the various, complex interconnections that dynamically constitute the notion of narrativity. This aim is counterbalanced by a second goal, namely that of contributing to the ‘emergence’ of a larger ‘pattern’ of narrativity – or, in other words, of developing, on the basis of a self-reflective, ‘rhizomatic’ epistemology, a macro-model of narrativity that provides the dynamic diversity of narrative interconnections with a systematic shape and order. This study renounces using the theories and terms of the physical, biological and mathematical branches of complexity theory, which require a high degree of specialised expertise. Nonetheless, this study is in need of another approach whose methodology, epistemology and terminology can be used both to explore the complexities that lie between the poles of narrative-narratological order and chaos and to perform what Morin calls a “self-interrogative loop” – that is, to reflect on the influence that one’s own perspective exerts on one’s object of research. Such an approach can be found in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1988 [1980]) philosophy of the “rhizome”, whose major ideas, principles and self-reflective epistemology are highly consistent with those characterising “systems thinking”. The present study is divided into two parts. Part A, which spans chapters 1 to 3, is dedicated to the theory of narrativity; Part B, by contrast, which comprises

7 As Capra puts it: “If everything is connected to everything, how can we ever hope to understand anything?” (1996, 41).

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chapters 4, 5 and 6, applies the insights gained in the first three chapters to the analysis of the literary ‘narrativities’ of three authors: Choderlos de Laclos, Franz Kafka and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Chapter 1 elaborates, on the one hand, on the epistemic and semiotic interplay between order and chaos in relation to narratology, to its core concept (narrativity) and to their interconnection; on the other hand, it presents the notion of the rhizome and reflects on the ways in which the rhizome has been and could be used to enhance narratology’s epistemic underpinnings. Chapter 2 works towards the systematisation of the concept of narrativity, whose multifacetedness and long history of theorisation makes it a highly ambiguous and chaotic notion. The major problem of such a systematisation consists not only in the high number of competing definitions of narrativity; it also consists in the difficulty of finding a method or conceptual tool that allows for the comparison of these various definitions since they differ in a broad range of (complexly interconnected) parameters. Which dimensions (and problems) do different approaches to narrativity integrate with, exclude from, ignore or highlight by their models? Where do they draw conceptual boundaries within this space of dimensions? How do they relate the dimensions that they have decided to integrate into their models? Which epistemic attitude, methodology or ideological position do they defend within their discursive field? Finally, in light of this multiplicity of definitional parameters, how can I avoid introducing a fictive order into my research review that distorts the factual complexity of narratological positions? While using the rhizome as an epistemological background perhaps cannot prevent my subjectivity from entering this research review, it might, however, be useful as a means to perform self-interrogative loops, which both lay bare and relativise my proper orders. Chapter 2 aims at providing not only an ordered, but also a critical research review. The discussion of existing approaches aims not only to uncover hidden orders, which structure the debate, but also aims to highlight those facets of narrativity that tend to be neglected, deemphasised or deprived of autonomy by narrative theory. The major result of this critical review, which seeks to combine analytical distinctions with a critical focus and a rhizomatic epistemology, will be the proposal of a new meta-model of narrativity, the so-called Pyramid of Narrativity. The goal of this pyramidal model will neither be to propose a new definition of narrativity nor to devaluate (“polemicise” or “refute”, as Morin puts it) previous definitions of narrativity. Refuting existing definitions would require the proposition of a new definition, but this would only aggravate the definitional chaos that gave rise to this study in the first place. If we want to make progress understanding narrativity, then we have “to reorganise our mental system” (as Morin suggests), that is, we have to question the way in which

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we have theorised so far. In this regard, it would be a mistake if we went on developing, in a competitive manner, new definitions of narrativity, which exist, so to speak, in a void, disconnected from any firm conceptual basis and are only randomly and selectively connected to each other. What we are obviously lacking is an overarching, systematic model of narrativity and its various dimensions. This is what the Pyramid of Narrativity aims to provide. Instead of “defining” narrativity and of drawing conceptual boundaries that would allow one to distinguish normatively between narrative and non-narrative, the pyramidal model pursues two other objectives. On the one hand, it should serve as a conceptual “map”, which provides the chaotic diversity of narrative dimensions with an integrative and systematic shape and thereby restructures the notion of narrativity. On the other hand, the Pyramid of narrativity should allow us to “locate” or “trace” narratological approaches, positions and arguments on this map, thus providing narratology with new landmarks as a means of self-reflection and orientation. In a nutshell, chapter 2 seeks to survey the “territory” of narrativity, but without neglecting its dynamic dimensions and “lines of flight” – that is, the ways in which narrativity “deterritorialises” itself in terms of its “rhizomatic” (temporal, cognitive, conceptual and semiotic, etc.) fluxes and changes. The critical analysis of the state of research in chapter 2 will lay bare three marked (and closely interconnected) tendencies among narratologists, which jointly form a theoretical and epistemic bias. According to this bias, narrativity lives by (i) the representation of narrative contents (representationalism), (ii) the successful narrative transmission (or reconstruction) of these contents; and, most importantly, by (iii) narrative coherence, considered as the measure and positive result of this successful communication of narrative contents. I will argue that this bias is problematic to the extent to which not all literary narratives are representationalist in nature, seek to transmit narrative contents successfully or allow readers successfully to establish narrative coherence and meaning. One might recall, in this connection, Morin’s position according to which “we have to begin with the extinction of false clarities. Not with what is clear and distinct, but with what is obscure and uncertain; not with what is secured knowledge, but with the criticism of certainty” (Morin 1977, 16).8 It is in the spirit of this determination that I will cast doubt on what I consider as the “false clarities” of the representationalist, rhetoric and coherentist paradigm of

8 “Il nous faut partir de l’extinction de fausses clartés. Non pas du clair et du distinct, mais de l’obscur et de l’incertain; non plus de la connaissance assurée, mais de la critique de l’assurance” (Morin 1977, 16).

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narratology and will attempt to illuminate hidden, conceptual links, which connect narrativity both to the essentially dynamic side of coherence (called “coherence in progress”) and to those literary forms and functions of narrativity that cannot be reduced to the coherent representation and transmission of contents. If, as Capra suggests, “[i]n the systems view we realize that the objects themselves are networks of relationships, embedded in larger networks” (1997, 37), chapter 3 aims to offer a new way of thinking narrativity by adding dynamic coherence and literariness to the network of its relevant conceptual connections. Chapter 3 will therefore explore in greater detail the concept of coherence, which emerges at the crossroads of various disciplines. In view of the subtle, hidden connections that link narrativity to coherence in progress and to aspects of literariness, chapter 3 will moreover make a case for a new paradigm of narratological analysis, which could allow the incommensurability between (narratology’s search for) a unitary, abstract, generic notion of narrativity and the multifaceted reality of various concrete (written, experienced and testified) narrativities to be overcome. As I will argue in chapter 3, one way of bridging this gap between narrative theory and hermeneutic narrative reality might consist of doing research into what I call narrative dynamics. This notion basically refers to the manifold ways in which (especially literary) narrative texts keep readers in processes of coherence in progress and prevent them from coming (quickly) to a successful, coherent, meaningful conclusion. Completing related reflections that have been presented in chapter 2, chapter 3 will elaborate on the importance, characteristics and advantages of this dynamic stage of narrativity as a new paradigm of research and thereby provide the conceptual basis for the concrete analyses of literary narrativities in Part B of this study. Part B will identify and discuss three different kinds of narrative dynamics whose analyses will primarily be based on existing interpretations of the respective novels under consideration. The overall aim of this part of the study will be, on the one hand, to illustrate the usefulness of both the narratological notion of “narrative dynamics” and of its focus on the connection between narrativity, dynamic coherence and literariness. On the other hand, Part B aims to provide, even outside of narratology, new interpretative insights into the respective novels; it thus seeks to make an independent contribution to the respective research literature. Why did I choose the novels of Laclos, Kafka and Toussaint? In brief, the major criterion for the selection of literary texts was diversity: if one introduces a new category of narratological analysis and even seeks to open a new paradigm of research, as I do with the notion of narrative dynamics, then it is crucial to show, by means of concrete analysis, that the new category can be fruitfully applied to

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various different sorts of narratives. Since this study focuses on the connection between narrativity and literariness, I have restricted myself, of course, to the selection of literary narratives. Nonetheless, within the realm of literary narratives, my selection of texts was guided by three subcriteria, namely diversity regarding the narratives’ (i) literary, historical and cultural context, (ii) literary quality (and/or canonicity) and (iii) kinds of complexity. Considering criterion (i), I have chosen with Les Liaisons dangereuses a text from the French Enlightenment (late eighteenth century), with Das Schloss a modern text from Prague (early twentieth century) and with Toussaint’s novels texts from a living, contemporary Belgian author who partakes in the post-Nouveau Roman-era (late twenty and early twenty-first century). Considering criterion (ii), there are considerable divergences concerning the literary qualities, status and canonisation of the three authors. Choderlos de Laclos is a canonised author whose epoch-making epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, is generally considered a masterpiece of the epistolary genre. Nonetheless, when it comes to the criterion of literary difficulty or opacity, this novel differs significantly from Kafka’s and Toussaint’s narratives, provided that the plot, in and by itself, is not problematic or hard to understand (as already the cinematic adaptations of the novel suggest), but rather thrilling and entertaining. That is, its literariness is bound to another form of literary (iii) complexity than those of Kafka and Toussaint. Kafka, as one of the celebrities of world literature, surely can be said to have a higher canonical status than Laclos, and he contrasts, in this regard, sharply with Toussaint whose literariness is highly disputed in the literary field. While interpreters have problems with understanding and interpreting both Kafka’s and Toussaint’s plots, the novels of these two authors confront interpreters simultaneously with contrary challenges and thus with different kinds of complexity: Kafka’s Schloss tends to overcharge readers with intradiegetic details, information and possibilities of interpretation, while Toussaint’s (partly “minimalist”) prose leaves readers with a minimum of narrative action and interpretative cues. To put it briefly, the novels of these three authors vary from each other in a number of regards. Given that this study seeks to explore the connection between narrativity, literariness and the complexity of narrative processing (coherence in progress), the novels’ high degree of diversity, especially with regard to the subcriteria (ii) and (iii), is promising. The succession of chapters follows the novels’ order of appearance; we start in the late eighteenth century and draw to an end in the twenty-first century. Chapter 4 analyses the narrativity of Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) in terms of a dynamics of narrative projection. According to my analysis, the feature that has gained most attention in the interpretive research literature on Laclos is its (multifarious) ambiguity. Ambiguity,

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for its part, is not only a typical property of literature, which is often invoked in order to underscore a work’s literary value (including Les Liaisons dangereuses), but also a phenomenon that is widely ignored by narrative theory. Chapter 4 thus works towards a theorisation of the novel’s dynamic narrativity, which is capable of taking this fundamental “literary” quality into account. It therefore introduces the notion of narrative projection, which describes a narrative dynamic that combines the features of literary ambiguity with elements of Roman Jakobson’s so-called “projection principle”. Subsequently, I will analyse Laclos’s epistolary novel with regard to its specific forms and functions of narrative projection. The focus will lie on the analysis of the novel’s perspectival ambiguity, as it manifests itself especially in its (probably most famous) letter XLVIII. Finally, the chapter will present some advanced reflections on the metaphorical implications of the notion of narrative projection, comparing it with a related, somehow rivalling approach to perspectival complexity, which uses blending theory and its networks as a conceptual basis. This chapter closes with some reflections on the explanatory scope and transferability of the notion of narrative projection with regard to other “ambiguous” narrative phenomena, which do not concern questions of viewpoint. Chapter 5 analyses the narrativity of Franz Kafka’s novelistic fragment Das Schloss, written in 1922, in terms of a dynamics of narrative withdrawal. Das Schloss has been the subject of intense narratological debates and analyses, which have to be taken into consideration if one seeks to provide a reliable narratological analysis of its narrative dynamics, that is, of the ways in which the novel keeps readers in processes of coherence in progress. It is significant, however, that narratological approaches proper tend to discuss primarily the challenge that Kafka poses to narratological categories of focalisation (and thus to one of the established key concepts of narratology), while interpretative approaches illuminate other hermeneutic difficulties, which concern the more fundamental problem of generating a coherent account of the fictive events. How can these factual difficulties of narrative processing, as they are experienced by interpreters, be analysed in narratological terms? Chapter 3 discusses two possibilities. On the one hand, there is a range of interpretative observations, which could be summarised, in a rather classical narratological terminology, as problems of emplotment. Kafka’s last novel constructs its plot in a way that does not follow typical principles of emplotment (such as eventfulness, teleology, causality, etc.); it thereby causes readers to spend a high amount of interpretive effort in the creation of a coherent plot. On the other hand, one has to admit, as one reads through various interpretations, that interpretive difficulties obviously cannot be reduced neither to questions of focalisation nor of emplotment. There is obviously something more basic, more general to the narrativity of Kafka’s Schloss, which this

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novel shares with other novels by Kafka – something which manifests itself, for instance, in the fuzzy notion of the “Kafkaesque”. Chapter 5 thus seeks to conceptualise these more fundamental problems, which readers experience as they read and try to understand the novel, in terms of narrative withdrawal. According to my analysis, this dynamic is brought about by a range of specific textual techniques on which I elaborate in section 5.4. Finally, I will shortly discuss the question of “meaning” and representation in Kafka’s Schloss and reflect on the ways in which the phenomenon of narrative withdrawal can be related to Kafka’s language scepticism and language games. Chapter 6, finally, analyses the narrativity of the contemporary novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint in terms of a dynamic of narrative resistance. In contradistinction to the other two narrative dynamics analysed in Part B of this study, it is the research literature itself that frequently uses the eponymous notion (i.e., the notion of “resistance”) in order to describe (facets of) the corresponding novels, although resistance has not yet been acknowledged in its potential to describe Toussaint’s narrativity as such. According to my terminology, narrative resistance refers to difficulties of processing (experienced and verbalised by interpreters), which arise from the fact that the text activates and simultaneously refuses to comply with cognitive schemata in general and with specific narrative expectations in particular. Chapter 6 focuses primarily on three forms of resistance, which are bound to the (i) expectation of ‘tellability’, (ii) the ‘function’ slots of various cognitive schemata and (iii) the expectation of ‘literariness’. The last form of resistance is of special importance in the context of the present study since, according to one of its central assumptions, the phenomenon of narrativity is somehow conceptually linked to the notions of coherence and literariness. Which textual and narrative characteristics are responsible for the fact that some readers doubt the literary quality and value of (some of) Toussaint’s novels? Are there correlations between the contrary judgments on the ‘literariness’ and on the perceived ‘coherence’ (or incoherence) of his novels? By addressing these questions, Chapter 6 provides the occasion to scrutinise, with regard to concrete narrative texts and interpretive approaches, the (rather abstract) theoretical claims that have been presented in Part A of this study. Before we close this introduction and enter Part A of this study, I would like to make some last technical remarks. As a German Romance philologist who bases her study about francophone and germanophone literature on English, French and German theories and interpretations, I had to make a decision concerning the language of this study and the handling of translations. I have decided to write this study in English because it pursues primarily narratological aims and the lingua franca of narratology is (currently) de facto the English language. Nonetheless, given that a vast part of the primary and secondary

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literature used in this study is francophone (or germanophone) and that translations, especially literary ones, are often compromises rather than fully satisfying solutions, I have decided to present longer, indented quotes (in most cases) in their original language and to add an official translation (or, when an official translation is not available, my own translation) into English in the corresponding footnotes. This seems, with regard to the already enormous volume of this study, to be a more practicable solution than the juxtaposition of the original and the translation in the running text. For shorter quotes, however, especially if they are syntactically integrated, I am using English translations to the benefit of fluent readability. Whenever I use footnotes to substantiate claims by corresponding quotations from the primary or research literature, I will keep mostly to the original language.

1 Preliminary Epistemic Considerations: Narrativity and Narratology Between Order and Chaos 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

On the relationship between narrativity and narratology 15 Narratology: History and status quo 17 Representation, point of view and coherence: Three core aspects of narrativity? 24 A semiotic circle and its three irreducibilities 31 The rhizome, its intricacies and its added value for narrative theory Deleuzian and rhizomatic approaches in literary and narrative theory

38 54

1.1 On the relationship between narrativity and narratology Narrative and narrativity are surely the most fundamental concepts of narratology. The analyses of narrative(s) have engendered a large amount of “core concepts” (see Herman et al. 2012; see also the entries of the [2014] Handbook of Narratology), which theorise the more or less universal (and more or less debated) structures, forms and functions of narrative. The concept of narrativity, by contrast, attempts to capture the specific nature of narrative, that is, its defining qualities. Narrativity can therefore be said to represent a second-degree object of narratological research – narratology’s attempt to give itself a theoretical fundament. The project of theorising narrativity thus represents a self-reflective effort, even an effort of self-organisation, since what narratology does, should do or must not do, what lies within and beyond the field of its duties, depends on how it conceptualises its object of research. As Gerald Prince puts it: Since narratology is the science of narrative (or a theory of narrative), its very scope depends on the definition of the latter. It is, as a famous article by Gérard Genette indicates, contingent upon the boundaries of narrative, upon distinctions between narrative and non-narrative, or between both and antinarrative, or even between narrative as entity and narrative as quality. As we know, nothing like a consensus has been reached on that subject. (Prince 2003, 1)

More recently, Meir Sternberg defended a similar position: Unless narrative has been defined in or by its narrativity, we leave the subject matter undelimited and risk missing its generic feature(s): narratologists then become liable to do everything indiscriminately together with, if not anything but, narratology. Nor is poor definition much better than none. In either case, the risk extends from theoretical systematizing to the branches of application and corpus-oriented work. (Sternberg 2010, 512) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-002

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In other words, far from being a gratuitous theoretical concept, narrativity is at the core of narratology, determining the contours, goals and developments of the latter. However, since narrativity does not (only) precede narratological practice (as a quality of narrative texts), but is (also) an outcome of it (as the result of definitions), narrativity and narratology do partly feed back on each other.1 In other words, narrativity is not (like narrative, for instance) the very object of theorisation, independent of scientific examination, but it exerts an influence on (the goals, methods and developments of) the discipline of narratology. Briefly, narrativity and narratology form a kind of ‘feedback loop’, which threatens requirements of scientific objectivity. I would like to exemplify this claim with two short examples, the first illustrating the influence of narratology on narrativity, the second the influence of narrativity on narratology. In 2008, John Pier and José Ángel García Landa published a volume dedicated to the theory of narrativity. In their contribution to the volume, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer propose a distinction between ‘mimetic’ and ‘diegetic’ kinds of narrativity, which builds on the classical distinction between mimesis and diegesis. Mimetic narrativity refers to “the representation of a temporal and/or causal sequence of events, with the degree of narrativity hinging upon the degree of eventfulness” (Nünning and Sommer 2008, 338). Diegetic narrativity, by contrast, denotes the verbal, as opposed to visual or performative, transmission of narrative content, [. . .] the representation of a speech act of telling a story by an agent called narrator. Whereas diegetic narrativity presupposes the presence of a speaker, a proposition, a communicative situation, and an addressee or a recipient role, mimetic narrativity does not. Similarly, while diegetic narrativity presupposes an underlying ‘communicational paradigm’, mimetic narrativity does not. (Nünning and Sommer 2008, 338)

Arguing that the two narrativities manifest themselves to different degrees and in different forms in narratives across various genres, Nünning and Sommer support the project of a “transgeneric narratology”, especially of a “narratology of drama” (Nünning and Sommer 2008, 343). They draw on Fludernik who “calls drama ‘the most important narrative genre whose narrativity needs to be documented’” (Nünning and Sommer 2008, 331), providing a definition of narrativity that is suited to make drama a legitimate object of narratological research. In other words, in order to institutionalise a new branch of narratology, i.e. to expand narratology, they develop a corresponding, two-fold definition of narrativity, which

1 I elaborate on this subject in greater detail elsewhere (see Wagner 2017). The considerations that are dedicated, in the present chapter, to this issue are in large parts borrowed from this article.

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should legitimise narratology to do research on drama, a genre that falls traditionally in the domain of the theory of drama. This is a case where the definition of narrativity is instrumental to the science-political goal of replacing the boundaries of narratology. Quite the inverted direction of influence can be found in Brian Richardson’s (2006; 2015) “unnatural narratology”. His approach relies on the distinction between mimetic and antimimetic narratives. Mimetic narratives correspond to the historical paradigm of realism; they “typically try to conceal their constructedness and appear to resemble nonfictional narratives” (Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 20). Antimimetic narratives, by contrast, correspond rather to the historical paradigm of postmodern, experimental fiction. According to Richardson, they “flaunt their artificiality and break the ontological boundaries that mimetic works so carefully preserve” (20). Richardson proposes his unnatural narratology as a reaction to the “sustained neglect of antimimetic narratives and, most importantly, an absence of comprehensive theoretical formulations capable of encompassing these works” (21). The direction of influence is thus quite the reverse of the one performed by Sommer and Nünning (2008). In order to give antimimetic dimensions of narratives a systematic place in narrative theory, Richardson creates a new branch of narratology. The diversification of narratology can thus be understood as both the source and the outcome of the diversification of narrativity. Do new notions (definitions, insights into its nature) of narrativity create new vectors of narratological research, or, conversely, do new narratological research interests or perspectives lead to new definitions of narrativity? In a “vicious” circle of mutual feedback, one can start from different positions, with the severe consequence that one lacks a fixed point from which narratological consolidation could start. This problem is one of the fundamental problems of “postclassical” narratology, which is generally considered to represent the discipline’s current historical stage.

1.2 Narratology: History and status quo According to a discourse in narratology that aims at tracing narratology’s historical development, one can distinguish three historical phases of narratology: first, the phase of its “prestructuralist” beginnings, which ended in the mid-60s of the twentieth century; second, the phase of “classical narratology” (until the mid-80s); and finally a “postclassical” phase, which still labels the narratology of today (see Herman 1999, Nünning and Nünning 2002, Sommer 2004, Prince 2008a, Alber and Fludernik 2010). Summarising narratological accounts of these phases, one can say that the divide between “classical” and “postclassical” narratology lives

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by oppositions: While classical, structuralist narratology focuses primarily on the text, postclassical narratology integrates the recipient as well as various contexts into its scope of theoretical examination. Classical narratology tries to fix welldefined narrative qualities or deep-structures and displays a strong tendency to establish binary categories and oppositions, taxonomies and symmetrical models,2 whereas postclassical narratology has “a better awareness of the processual character of [narrative] texts” (Jahn 2000, 384) as well as of the pitfalls of “geometrical clarity, symmetry and proportion” (Gibson 1996, 3). While classical narratology is primarily interested in generic narrative universals and concentrates on canonical texts, postclassical narratology is also concerned with the meaning of specific narratives, examines “less canonical or more subversive texts, non-fictional and nonliterary stories, natural or spontaneous oral narratives, filmic accounts but also theatrical, pictorial, musical ones” (Prince 2008a, 117) and reaches “beyond form”, including pragmatics, gender, cognition and ideology (see Fludernik 2005, 44–46). Initially, postclassical narratology was the subject of high optimism. It countered stories of the death or crisis of narratology as a consequence of the demise of structuralism. Herman, for instance, states its “extraordinarily vital and innovative work” and praises its “host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself” (Herman 1999, 2–3). He notes that “narratology has in fact ramified into narratologies” (Herman 1999, 1, orig. emphasis), proclaiming a “narratological renaissance” (2). This optimistic idea of the “renaissance” of narratology, i.e. of a crisis that has successfully been overcome, found a strong echo (see, for instance, Nünning and Nünning 2002, 1; Petry 2004, 226). However, this mood of elation has gradually changed with regard to the flipside of narratological proliferation and diversification: narratology is nowadays threatened by the dissolution of its boundaries. It risks losing its unity or identity as a discipline. Kindt’s and Müller’s (2003b) question “What is narratology?” symptomises this ‘identity’ crisis, born out of the difficulty to discriminate between narratology’s Self and its ‘Other’. Accordingly, many contributions of that volume are concerned with exploring narratology’s borderlines. They try to “survey narratology” (Prince 2003), to determine its “systematic place” (Titzmann 2003) and to delimit it from theories (and practices) of interpretation (see Kindt and Müller 2003a) or of fiction (see Martínez and Scheffel 2003). Prince explains in this context: I believe that such surveyings of narratology’s borders and such restrictions on its proper domain are valuable since they promote – against adhocity – methodicalness and generality, since they help to provide a well-defined object of study and well-defined (ultimate)

2 Fludernik (2005, 38), for instance, speaks about a “rage for binary opposition, categorization and typology”.

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goals for the discipline [. . .], and since they resist the (unreflective) conflation of the theoretical, the descriptive, and the interpretive [. . .]. (Prince 2003, 10)

Some years later, Prince (2008a, 116) still notes critically: “It even seems that, for some of its most fervent champions, no question – nothing in narrative texts or in their many contexts – is alien to postclassical narratology”. He adds that “[c]lassical narratology tried to set certain questions aside. Postclassical narratology yields perhaps too easily to the temptation of asking them all” (Prince 2008a, 120). There is thus a call for narratological consolidation, which seems quite legitimate, given that narratology has experienced considerable internal diversification; Nünning (2003) distinguishes no fewer than eight classes of narrative theories, which comprise more than fourty “narratologies”.3 However, there seems to be an increasing awareness of the necessity of interrelating the dispersed plurality of narrative theories. On the one hand, this concerns the relation between classical and postclassical narratology. Herman already explains that postclassical “research on narrative does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models” (Herman 1999, 3). Prince (2008a, 116) notes that postclassical narratology is not a “rejection of classical narratology but an extension, an expansion, a broadening, a refinement” of it. Alber and Fludernik (2010), in much the same way, explain that one of the duties of postclassical narratology is “to determine how these [‘postclassical’] thematic and contextual inflections of narratology can be linked to the structuralist core in methodologically sound ways” (5). On the other hand, the need for interlinkage and integration concerns the relation between the diverse postclassical theories. As Alber and Fludernik (2010) put it, “one now has to address the question of how these various narratologies overlap and interrelate” (5). They suggest “that we have reached a new stage at which one has to ponder the overlaps and potential areas of cross-fertilization between the numerous flourishing narratologies” (Alber and Fludernik 2010, 15), i.e. “a phase which is dominated by partial consolidation without any undue reaching after singularity” (21). Briefly, postclassical, up-to-date narratology negotiates

3 Nünning (2003, 249–251) distinguishes between (i) contextualist, thematic and ideological, (ii) transgeneric and transmedial, (iii) pragmatic and rhetorical, (iv) cognitive- and receptionoriented, (v) postmodern and poststructuralist, (vi) linguistic and (vii) philosophical narratology as well (viii) narratology oriented towards other aspects, such as artificial intelligence, anthropology or historiography. Each of these narratological paradigms hosts various theories and approaches. See also Nünning and Nünning (2002). The approach defended by the present study reveals the epistemic weakness of such taxonomic orderings inasmuch as it rhizomatically connects contextualist, pragmatic, cognitive- and reception-oriented, poststructuralist and linguistic dimensions.

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between two contrary needs: on the one hand, as the initial optimism about narratology’s “renaissance” shows, there is a need for diversity, supposed to ensure narratology’s vitality. On the other hand, there is a contrary need for unity, supposed to ensure narratology’s identity as a discipline. The topic of the third conference of the European Narratology Network, which took place in March 2013, encapsulates this inner conflict with its conference title: “Emerging Vectors of Narratology: Toward Consolidation or Diversification?” The status of the historiographical divide between classical and postclassical narratology, however, is precarious. Prince (2008a) subscribes to the distinction between a classical and a postclassical phase, but he relativises two connotations of postclassical narratology. Firstly, he challenges the idea that the postclassical phase represents a kind of revolutionary development within narratology.4 Secondly, he calls into question the idea according to which the struggle for a disciplinary unity is a specifically postclassical phenomenon.5 Some narratologists go further by disclaiming the value or truthfulness of the opposition as such. Sternberg calls it a “pseudohistorical distinction” (2010, 519) and asks whether the idea of postclassicism “corresponds to any actual reality of time and/or thought” (Sternberg 2010, 509). It cannot be denied, however, that narratological postclassicism corresponds at least to a discursive reality: it exists within the confines of a narratological discourse that tries to bring an order into decades of narrative research. The function of this discourse is to reduce the chaotic diversity of thousands of narratological contributions to a manageable number of influential, somehow representative approaches, to identifiy general directions of research and to trace historical developments. It seems, however, as if some historiographical accounts of narratology6 display a certain degree of narrativity, i.e. that the “history of narratology” is,

4 “Perhaps, instead of revolution, it was a matter of normal, expectable evolution” (Prince 2008a, 119). 5 “[. . .] from the beginning, the history of narratology (like its prehistory) has been marked not only by a variety of inspirations – linguistic, anthropological, rhetorical, philosophical – but also by controversies, disputes, and transformations, [. . .] many practitioners disagreeing about the very nature of the discipline and its object” (Prince 2008a, 119). 6 There is, however, also a broad range of approaches that account for the history of narratology in terms of oppositions or a network instead of narrating a story. See, for instance, Herman’s (2005, 21) “genealogical” approach, which attempts to “situate recent theories of narrative in a complex lineage, a network of historical and conceptual affiliations”. McHale (2005), for his part, argues that all of narratology is divided into two competing orientations, one being structuralist, the other historicist. He claims that “under the big tent of narrative theory, structuralism and historicism jockey for position, each seeking to outflank or overcome the other, to contain the other, [. . .] to forget or repress the other” (64, orig. emphasis).

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partially at least, also a ‘story’ that narratology tells about itself. As Fludernik observes, “[t]he history of narratology has recently been cast in two different plots” (2005, 36), one of them ending “as a success story” (37). Whether one agrees with this claim depends, of course, on the way one conceives of ‘story’ and/or ‘narrativity’. One dimension of narrativity, which is quite commonly accepted, does of course not apply to the history of narratology: the presence of an anthropomorphic experiencer. Narratology is a discipline, or a large field of narrative theories, but not a human or human-like agent (even if human agents – narratologists – are indispensable for narratology’s existence). Nevertheless, there are tendencies to anthropomorphicise (or “experientialise”, as one could say with a sideglance to Fludernik’s [1996] theory) narratology. Alber and Fludernik propose telling “a Bildungsroman-like story of narratology. In this reading, Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists figure as narratology’s infancy and the structuralist models of the 1960s and 1970s as it adolescence” (Alber and Fludernik 2010, 4). According to this “story”, David Herman’s Narratologies (1999) represents narratology’s “first adult phase”, while the current state of research – that of consolidation and continued diversification – is argued to represent narratology’s second (adult) phase (see Alber and Fludernik 2010, 4–5). Anthropomorphic categories also play a role in Herman’s approach. He reconstructs two “stories” of narratology – one recounting its death, one recounting its state of crisis – and decides explicitly to narrate a third one: that of narratology’s renaissance. Noticeably, all the three stories have anthropomorphic and/or experiential connotations: death and crisis are fundamental, experiential threats; and renaissance (re-naissance), which refers, at least literally, to the idea of a re-birth,7 positively contrasts with these two threats. But are such “stories” of narratology not simply a ludic, somehow metaphoric way of speaking? Does the use of anthropomorphic, experiential vocabulary not simply aim at giving a more interesting shape to a per se nonnarrative, historiographical discourse? Drawing on Hayden White, we could pose an important counterquestion: “What would a non-narrative representation of historical reality look like?” (White 1996, 5). White distinguishes between three basic kinds of historical representation, the annals, the chronicle and the history proper. White highlights the fact that the first two forms of historiography are generally devaluated by historiographers. According to White’s analysis, the reason for this devaluation is a

7 “The one who says ‘Renaissance’ inscribes oneself into an imaginative structure: into a myth-like drama of initiation [which tells the story] of origin, of the loss of oneself and of rebirth” (Koschorke 2012, 256, my translation).

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lack of narrativity: annals and chronicles fail to fully “narrativise” the events that they list. For White, narrativity is defined via three aspects that are closely interrelated: formal coherency (closure), meaning and moral value. History proper requires, of course, more than just narrativity. According to White, it also has to manifest “a proper concern for the judicious handling of evidence, and it must honor the chronological order of the original occurrence of the events” (White 1996, 5). But this chronological sequence must be endowed with meaning. According to White, historiographical meaning comes into being through the act of imposing upon the reality “the form of a story”, i.e. “well-marked beginning, middle, and end phases” (White 1996, 2). The annals form only offers a list of chronologically ordered events and thus does not tell a story at all; it only lists facts whose meaning and semantic interrelatedness are entirely obscure. The chronicle, by contrast, develops elements of a story structure, establishes relationships between events, but then fails to bring the story to an end. “It does not so much conclude as simply terminate. [. . .] it leaves things unresolved” (White 1996, 5). The meaning of the story thus depends on the formal coherency that closure and resolution brings about. According to White, this closure possesses moral value. The source of this moralising aspect is the situatedness of the storyteller, his or her belonging to a social order or system. The storyteller’s relation to and/or position in this social order causes him/her to narrate. Narrativity “presupposes the existence of a legal system, against or on behalf of which the typical agents of a narrative account militate” (White 1996, 13).8 White comes to the conclusion “that narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (White 1996, 14). This morality or partiality, anchored in the narrator’s perspective, determines the formal coherency that the storyteller gives to his/her story, especially the story’s closure, understood by White as a moralising ending. What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from one moral order to another? I confess that I cannot think of any other way of ‘concluding’ an account of real events; for we cannot say, surely, that any sequence of real events actually comes to an end, that reality itself disappears, that events of the order of the real have ceased to happen. Such events could only have seemed to have ceased to happen when meaning is shifted, and shifted by narrative means, from one physical or social space to another. [. . .] Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or a moralizing impulse is present, too. (White 1996, 22, his emphasis)

8 White (1996, 12) also explains that “[t]he reality which lends itself to narrative representations is the conflict between desire, on the one side, and the law, on the other.”

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White sustains the hypothesis that historiographical norms of his time require a joint combination of historicality and narrativity, and that this combination provides history proper with moral value. “I have sought to suggest that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherency, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (White 1996, 23). The inherently imaginary or fictive nature of historiographical coherence has recently also been highlighted, from a cultural-semiotic perspective, by Albrecht Koschorke: [. . .] auch die Vergangenheit wird der Gegenwart fortlaufend assimiliert, sie erhält nicht allein ihre Deutungen, sondern auch einen Teil ihrer Strukturen ex post und ist insofern bis zu einem gewissen Grad fiktiv – als Modelliermasse einer retrospektiv zugeschriebenen Signifikanz und als Objekt einer Rekonstruktion, die ihre Kategorien aus der jeweiligen Jetztzeit bezieht und rückwärts anwendet. Diesem Mechanismus ist die professionelle Geschichtswissenschaft im Prinzip in gleicher Weise wie das Laienwissen unterworfen. (Koschorke 2012, 225)9

One could summarise these reflections on the relationship between history and narrativity by saying that, firstly, historiography provides events with a closure that cannot be legitimated by the events themselves (since they do not cease to happen); that, secondly, the creation of closure and formal coherency produces (and is produced by) a meaning or meanings that do not inhere in the events as such; and that, thirdly, these meanings are bound to the narrator’s perspective, which is, by itself, historical, contingent, ephemeral (“moral”) and anchored in the social and epistemic situatedness of the narrator. Do these theoretical considerations shed new light on the historical divide of narratology into a classical and a postclassical phase? At first glance, perhaps not: no one “closes” the history of narratology. The “Bildungsroman-like story” does not conclude, but rather terminate at narratology’s “second adult phase”; the story of narratology goes on. However, closure should probably not be misinterpreted as meaning “not to be continued”; the phenomenon of closure refers, as White and Koschorke suggest, to the development of structures, categories and meanings that are retrospectively ascribed to a time segment. This surely fits the

9 “[. . .] also the past is continuously assimilated to the present; the past is provided ex post not only with interpretations, but partly with a part of its structures, thereby becoming, to a certain extent, fictive – [inasmuch as] it [i.e. the past, ESW] is the modelling compound of a significance, which is ascribed retrospectively, and the object of a reconstruction, which takes its categories from the respective now-time and applies them backwards. This mechanism applies in principle as much to professional historiography as to lay knowledge” (translation mine).

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history of narratology, with its categories (“prestructuralist”, “classical”, “postclassical” narratology, see above; “autonomist”, “contextualist”, “foundationalist”, “heuristic narratology”, see Kindt and Müller 2003a) and the dichotomic meanings ascribed to them (see Kindt’s and Müller’s [2003a] bifurcating tree structure of narratologies). But what about White’s claims concerning narrativity’s moral value? Is there an “impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (White 1996, 14)? Indeed, narratology is itself a social system and the source of a latent morality that informs its historiography. It is worth noting, in this context, that, as we have seen above, narratological historiography tells stories about threats. This is interesting inasmuch as the concept of threat itself has moral implications; what counts as a threat (or not) depends on the perspective that one assumes, i.e. on the position from which one speaks. According to stories of narratology, the decline of structuralism threatened its survival – but it survived by means of (telling its) rebirth (see Herman 1999). Currently, it is diversification that threatens narratology – but the (narrated) search for overlaps and interrelations may “consolidate” narratology, saving it from its collapse, from the threat of being torn apart by its own centrifugal forces (see Alber and Fludernik 2010). What is at stake in these stories is the maintenance, the functioning and the legitimacy (or “authority”, in White’s terminology) of the system of narratology itself. Narratologists that tell narratology’s (hi)story are concerned with narratology’s subsistence, since they are, metaphorically speaking, the inhabitants of this socio-scientific sphere. In other words, if narratology loses its pertinence, its identity, its raison d’être, narratologists lose their professional identity. This is what gives a certain “moral value” to their “representation” of the history of narratology – a value that “arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherency, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (White 1996, 23).

1.3 Representation, point of view and coherence: Three core aspects of narrativity? One may agree with White’s analysis or not, but one can hardly deny that the borderline between historicality and narrativity, if it may be drawn at all, is a fuzzy or at least a problematic one. Of course, whether and where one draws the line between these two aspects depends upon how one defines the two terms. Fludernik (1996), for instance, excludes historiography from the realm of the narrative, since historiographical accounts do not mediate human experientiality,

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which represent the core of narrativity (in her “natural narratology”). In my eyes, by contrast, it is problematic to separate narrativity so clearly from what is historical, since White’s analysis of historiography identifies at least three aspects that are also key dimensions of narrativity as well as core problems of narratology. Firstly, there is the dimension of representation. Just as historiography is based upon – and questions – the relationship between the “past proper” and its representation, narratology constructs and deconstructs (briefly: struggles with) the idea that narrative is constituted by two parts: a story (histoire), the content or chain of events (action, happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters, items of setting); and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated. In simple terms, the story is the what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse the how. (Chatman 1978, 19, orig. emphasis)

Some deconstruct this opposition (see e.g. Culler 198110; Gibson 1996), others defend it (e.g. Mitchell 1980; Chatman 1988)11; others, again, refine it. Schmid (2005), for instance, proposes to substitute this conceptual pair by a more differentiated model with four levels, comprising (i) Geschehen (“happenings” – the amorphous entirety of situations, persons and actions that a narrative implicitly or explicitly mediates or logically implies), (ii) Geschichte (“story” – the result of the selection of elements and qualities out of the infinite mass of “happenings”, including the creation of a meaningful gestalt), (iii) Erzählung (“discourse” or “narration” – result of an act of composition, whereby the story is transposed into an ordo artificialis, including sequentiality as well as, possibly, the permutation of segments of the “story”) and (iv) Präsentation der Erzählung (“presentation of the discourse” – its verbal manifestation) (see Schmid 2005, 241–243). Such discussions, concerning the number of narrative “levels”, aim at theorising representation. The distinction between “story” and “discourse” theorises narrative representation as a two-fold entity, made of something given (the narrative content or fabula) and its representation (the narrative form or sjuzhet). The finergrained, four-fold model rather highlights the processual and constructivist aspects of representation. It lays bare the activities that lead from one (factual or fictive, unprocessed) materiality (“amorphous entirety” of happenings) to another

10 Culler (1981) identifies a double logic in narrative, which challenges the idea that events (i.e., the story) precede their discursive representation. Analysing the logical interdependency of narrative story and discourse in Oedipus and in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Culler argues that “[o]ne logic assumes the primacy of events; the other treats the events as the products of [discoursive, ESW] meanings” (Culler 1981, 178). 11 See section 2.5.1.

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materiality (the verbal form of discourse, for instance): selection of story elements, establishment of relationships between the selected elements, acts of composition, acts of writing, etc. But, as the opposition between Fludernik’s (1996) “natural” and Richardson’s (2006; 2015) “unnatural” narratology, shows, there is even no consensus as to the question whether narratives necessarily have a representationalist (“mimetic”) function at all. Insofar as Richardson concentrates on the “antimimetic” aspects of narratives, representationalism, as a core dimension of narrativity, is put into question. Moreover, the idea of representation itself has its own epistemological pitfalls that have not gone unnoticed in narratology. Andrew Gibson (1996), for instance, distinguishes between two forms of representations. “Surface representation”, on the one hand, refers to the idea of representing something that has been seen (heard, felt, etc.) and that is considered as prompting and preceding its very representation. “Representation of depths”, on the other hand, “means penetrating the visible”; it aims to represent “essences, general features, types” and has “faith in the existence of universals” (Gibson 1996, 82). Gibson deconstructs the two. Surface representation neither takes account of the selectivity and “theoretical” conditionality of acts of perception, nor does it overcome a naïve conception of language as a transparent, neutral medium. Moreover, it “hypostasises clarity and distinctness” (Gibson 1996, 83). Concerning the representation of depths, Gibson suggests that “perhaps the belief in truth as representable, permanent essence is fearful, a flight from the sensuous multiplicity of the world and its unbearable proliferations” (Gibson 1996, 86). This second kind of representationalism has an unreflected, implicit condition, namely an epistemological preference for models that identify a “deep” (latent, implicit), fixable wholeness and clarity. This preference is opposed to the recognition of life “as surface, flux, proximity” (Gibson 1996, 85). Furthermore, this kind of representationalism does not recognise its own relativity: There is no permanent, neutral matrix for all inquiry guaranteeing the doctrines of ‘deep representation’. There is not and never will be a transcendental standpoint outside representations [. . .] from which the relations between representations and their objects can be inspected. Epistemic shifts continually change the meaning of terms. (Gibson 1996, 85)

A similar point is made by Koschorke with regard to epistemological norms of rationality: Der Versuch, alle als sinnvoll zugelassenen Aussagen auf eine einheitliche, über alle Diskursgrenzen hinweg intersubjektiv überprüfbare rationale Grundlage zu stellen – ein Versuch, wie ihn etwa die analytische Philosophie unternimmt –, gelingt nur um den Preis theoretischer Operationen, deren Eigengewicht und verändernde Wirkung systematisch mitberücksichtigt werden muss: Isolation eines doch dem Fluss der Geschichte

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anheimgegeben Sachverhalts; Abstraktion von situativen Umständen, kulturellen Bedingungen, von den Kontexten des jeweils Mit-Gesagten oder ungesagt Bleibenden; artifizielle Logifizierung des auf diese Weise herausdestillierten ‘Kernproblems’. Das widerstrebende Material wird also mit großem Aufwand erst dekulturalisiert, um das auf diesem Weg zustande gebrachte Präparat sodann auf eine nicht-kulturelle, universelle Aussagelogik reduzieren zu können: ein letztlich tautologisches Unternehmen. (Koschorke 2012, 143, orig. emphasis)12

Representation is thus associated with constructivism and challenged as a core aspect of narrativity; it is inseparable from questions concerning the possibility of scientific objectivity and rationality in general. It connects historiography and the theory of narrativity with fundamental epistemic problems. The second dimension on which White’s analysis of the narrativity of historiography touches is ‘point of view’. It is interwoven with the problematic of representation, provided that the idea of an (truthful, right, adequate or) objective representation is irreconcilable with the insight that every (act of) representation is anchored in a specific epistemic stance, which coexists with other epistemic stances, thus displaying but a particular point of view out of a number of possible viewpoints (epistemological relativity). ‘Point of view’ plays a role in White’s analysis of historiography inasmuch as it is the historiographer’s perspective that brings about the history’s moralising dimension. Point of view (also labelled ‘perspective’ or ‘focalisation’) is also a crucial dimension of narrative analysis and, as Uspensky (1973) argues, of the structure of an artistic text. According to Uspensky, “we may consider point of view as an ideological and evaluative position; we may consider it as a spatial and temporal position of the one who produces the description of the events (that is, the narrator, whose positions is fixed along spatial and temporal coordinates); we may study it with respect to perceptual characteristics; or we may study it in a purely linguistic sense” (Uspensky 1973, 6). Given that these perspectival “planes” can possibly be found and analysed not only in narrative texts, but also in scientific, e.g. narratological texts,

12 “The attempt – undertaken, for example, by analytical philosophy – to give a rational, homogenous fundament to assertions that are deemed reasonable – a fundament valid across discursive boundaries and susceptible of intersubjective evidence – may only succeed with the aid of theoretical operations whose dead weight and performative effects have to be taken into consideration systematically: isolation of a state of affairs that partakes in a flux of historical developments; abstraction from situational circumstances, from cultural conditions and from the contexts of the unsaid or with-said; artificial logification of the ‘core problem’ extracted by these means. The intractable material is thus firstly, and at the utmost effort, getting cleared of its cultural implications, just in order to make it possible, then, to reduce the object, produced and manipulated by such means, to a non-cultural, universal, propositional logic: an ultimately tautological enterprise” (translation mine).

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one can say that viewpoint is an epistemic universal, which plays a role in each kind of ordering, be it a narrative or a narratological order. A third aspect, which is crucial both in White’s approach and in narrative theory, is the idea of coherence (or, alternatively, “closure”, “formal coherency”, structure, order, etc.). As far as I see, this is one of the most important problematics of narrativity, and it will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters. I do not want to anticipate too much, but so far we have already seen that the process of establishing coherence is essential to the idea of (narrative) representation as such: Schmid’s (2005) transition from “happenings” to the “presentation of the narration” involves three successive stages of ordering activities: firstly, one gives an eventful shape, a meaningful gestalt to the “amorphous” entirety of situations, persons and actions (happenings → story); secondly, one gives a “discoursive” order (composition) to the story (story → discourse); thirdly, by verbalizing the discourse, a linguistic (as well as, probably, a material or medial) order is introduced (discourse → presentation of discourse). Gibson’s criticism of the two forms of representationalism equally takes the problematic role of order into account: perception, which motivates surface representation, is a highly selective process. Insofar as perceptual selection proceeds via certain habits, structures or principles, it has an order that reality as such has not. Gibson’s criticism of the representation of depths also touches on the dynamics of coherence since Gibson considers essences and types (as well as the stability associated with them) as (fearful, ordering) reductions of the world’s “multiplicity” (and “flux”, i.e. time-bound mutations). This brings us back to epistemological relativity, that is, to the insight that an ultimate order, unity, or closure is impossible (or a constructivist illusion, respectively), even on an epistemic level: “Assuming an external stance, one sees that even the universal is a particular semantic operation” (“Aus der Fremdperspektive ist auch das Universale eine partikulare semantische Operation”, Koschorke 2012, 141), for How do divergent universalisms interrelate? Systematically integrating the stance of an external observer into the big picture not only makes it necessary to abandon the idea of a unity of the epistemic world. One also has to give up [. . .] the expectation according to which higher regions of the episteme are in a more organized, ordered state than the depths of an entangled empiricism. (Koschorke 2012, 141, translation mine)13

13 “Wie verhalten sich divergente Universalismen zueinander? Wer den möglichen Einspruch des Fremdbeobachters systematisch in das Gesamtbild einbezieht, muss nicht nur von der Idee einer Einheit der epistemischen Welt Abschied nehmen. Er hat sich überdies von der Erwartung [. . .] zu lösen, dass in den höheren Regionen der Episteme klarere, formvollendetere Verhältnisse herrschen als in den Niederungen einer verworrenen Empirie” (Koschorke 2012, 141).

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This insight is somehow fundamental for postmodernism: “Polyregularity without a totality rule – this is how one might describe [the postmodern structure]” (Welsch 1991, 324, translation mine). The problem of order or coherence thus appears on different levels. In simplified terms, one might say that, on the one hand, there is the order with which fictional or factual events are provided by means of representation (representational order); on the other hand, there is the order that produces the representational order (epistemic order). On both levels, order (coherence, structure) is inseparable from its counterpart, which has different names (depending on the context): chaos, multiplicity, flux, incoherence, the amorphous, etc. This is why Gibson claims that “[r]epresentation and scepticism about representation continually reverse back into each other, reveal themselves as unseparable” (Gibson 1996, 71) and maintains that “[w]e are caught in an irreducible doubleness: on the one hand Vattimo’s ‘oscillation, plurality, and, ultimately . . . erosion’ of the very ‘principle of reality’ [. . .], and, on the other, Baudrillard’s ‘hysteria of production and reproduction of the real’” (Gibson 1996, 72–73). For Gibson, this doubleness is constitutive for postmodernity: “[. . .] postmodern culture is caught in a double-bind. For the present, there seems to be no possibility or ‘purity’ on either side, representationalist or sceptic, no avoiding contamination or supplementation by the other” (Gibson 1996, 75). This insight into the interdependence of order and disorder also guides Koschorke’s general narrative theory. He bases his theory on Lotman’s (2001) semiotic theory of semiospheres – because (as he notes) this theory “provides conceptional tools that allow for comprehension of the interlocking of the tendencies to give structure and to destroy structure” (Koschorke 2012, 119, orig. emphasis, translation mine).14 He explains his reference to Lotman by the fact that the latter may be considered as a “theorician of disorder” (“Theoretiker der Unordnung”, Koschorke 2012, 123). Lotman’s and Koschorke’s theories share the view that “order and disorder, integration and disintegration are no strict antinomies, but components of a dynamic interplay” (“[. . .] stellen [. . .] Ordnung und Unordnung, Integration und Desintegration keine strikten Gegensätze dar, sondern sind Komponenten eines beweglichen Wechselspiels”, Koschorke 2012, 128–129).15 Koschorke’s position suggests that the theoretical pendulum – that has swung to the extreme end of order during structuralism and to the extreme end of disorder during deconstruction – has reached the middle. In 1988, Chatman wonders 14 “[. . .] gibt sie begriffliche Werkzeuge an die Hand, um das Ineinandergreifen strukturierender und entstrukturierender Tendenzen [. . .] nachzuvollziehen” (Koschorke 2012, 119, orig. emphasis). 15 In the realm of the natural sciences, complex systems theory has contributed significantly to the exploration of this field of inquiry.

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about the consequences of deconstruction, asking “What next? What do we get from deconstruction?” (Chatman 1988, 9). His answer is an argument in favor of the primacy of narratological orderings: Without denying the value of deconstructive analysis of literary texts, we should not, I believe, give up the project of improving theoretical distinctions and terms. [. . .] deconstruction presupposes structuralist efforts to understand the complex codes amidst which we live and cannot itself exist apart from them. (Chatman 1988, 10)

In 1996, Gibson answers, in a way, Chatman’s defense of narratological orderings by proposing to deconstruct narratology: “deconstruction of its classifications and categories, its ‘levels’ and ‘frames’, its geometrics of narrative space and its freezings of narrative, the oppositional structures according to which it elaborates its thematics” (Gibson 1996, 14). He claims that, “[b]y a practice of deconstruction, narratology may conceivably become a multiplicity in itself” (Gibson 1996, 15). In the meantime, this virtual multiplicity of narratology has become – at least a discursive – reality, prompting narratologists to reflect upon the alternative of “consolidation or diversification” in narratology. The current challenge thus seems to be rather epistemological than purely narratological. It concerns the question of how to negotiate between structure and chaos, construction and deconstruction. As Koschorke’s (2012) position illustrates, the challenge consists in describing (narrative, narratological, historiographical, epistemic) negotiations between order and disorder, rather than in voting for the former or the latter. Koschorke’s (2012) first chapter draws on the notions of ‘homo narrans’ (the human as the “storytelling animal”) and of ‘homo ludens’ (which highlights the pertinence of playful activities on all levels of human sociality) as two anthropological determinations that are crucial for narrative theory. I would like to propose a third one: ‘homo ordinans’, which would not (only) determine the human as ‘the order-creating animal’, but first and foremost as ‘the human animal in need of order’ – “a need over which we are not the masters, the need to impress the stamp of order upon the chaos of existence, of sense upon nonsense, of concordance upon discordance” (Ricœur 1985, 27).16

16 As Chatman remarks, “the interesting thing is that our minds inveterately seek structure, and they will provide it if necessary” (1978, 45). Koschorke highlights the fact that order, like that established by clear-cut categories, dichotomies and so on, has cognito-economical functions: “Tatsächlich sind binäre Schemata die Grundbausteine jeder stabilisierten kulturellen Semantik. Was den Aufwand an intellektueller Arbeit betrifft, ist es ökonomisch, in glatten Gegensätzen zu denken; sie liefern zu den geringsten Kosten die größte Trennschärfe [. . .] Aber keine semantische Ordnung kann allein auf solchen Binarismen beruhen, weil neben den festen immer auch bewegliche [. . .] Elemente notwendig sind, um überhaupt Ordnung in der Zeit herzustellen“ (Koschorke 2012, 21–22) [Indeed, binary schemata are the basic elements of every

1.4 A semiotic circle and its three irreducibilities

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1.4 A semiotic circle and its three irreducibilities So far, we may come to the conclusion that narrativity is associated with three kinds of irreducibilities, due to epistemic relativity (see Figure 1). Firstly, there is an irreducible diversity of things, facts, situations, happenings – the multiplicity of the world as such, “the flux of unknowable and indivisible being”, as Fludernik (1996, 41) puts it. Secondly, there is an irreducible (human) need for order, an impetus to establish a coherence out of this multiplicity, a drive for the construction or detection of structures inherent in this diversity. This need leads to ordering acts, which may be conceptualised – with a sideglance to Lotman (2001) – as acts of “translation”: the irreducible diversity is translated into a structure. What does “translation” mean in this context? With reference to Lotman, one may say that the transformation of disorder into order is an act of assimilation of (parts of) an irreducible ‘Other’ (chaos, the outside of the proper “semiosphere”) into the ‘Self’ (the proper “semiosphere”). As I see it, assimilation can be achieved by the selection of items out of a diversity and by the establishment of meaningful relationships between them. But meaningful relationships cannot be created ex nihilo: the creation of a gestalt happens on the basis of existing structures, of a certain rationality (so to speak) – it depends on one’s way(s) of thinking, on structures that inhere in the proper viewpoint, on familiar (cultural, cognitive, semiotic) schemata, perceptual habits – more generally speaking, on one’s “code(s)” (in Lotman’s terminology) or “experientiality” (see Caracciolo 2014). Both Lotman’s “code” and White’s “moral value” are associated with a process of translation: according to Lotman, information of one semiosphere is translated into the code of another semiosphere; according to White, the translation of historical evidence into a historiographical narrative depends upon the value that one attaches to (relations between) events according to one’s own perspective. There is thus a third irreducibility: irreducible perspectivity (inherent in Lotman’s “semiospheres” and in White’s “moral value”).17 The creation of order, i.e. the translation of stabilised, cultural semantics. It is economical, with regard to the amount of intellectual effort, to think in clear-cut oppositions; they have the greatest discriminatory power for the least costs [. . .] But no semantic order can be entirely based on such binarisms, since, in addition to fixed elements, also dynamic elements [. . .] are always necessary if one wants to establish order at all under the conditions of temporality] (translation mine). 17 Schmid (2005, 249) points to the perspectivity that inheres in the creation of a story (by means of selecting significant events from the level of sheer happenings): “Die Auswahl der Geschehensmomente und ihrer Eigenschaften konstituiert nicht nur eine Geschichte, sondern auch die ihr inhärente perzeptive, räumliche, zeitliche, ideologische und sprachliche Perspektive. In rein narratorialer Wiedergabe ist die implizite Perspektivität der Geschichte mehr oder weniger deutlich spürbar.”

Figure 1: The three irreducibilities of the semiotic circle (epistemic relativity).

32 1 Preliminary Epistemic Considerations: Narrativity and Narratology

1.4 A semiotic circle and its three irreducibilities

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disorder into an ordered structure cannot be “neutral” or “objective” in the sense of “independent of a specific viewpoint”. As Sternberg puts it, “all discourse actually has perspectivity built into it: there is no representation without evaluation, across media, no communication without sender/addressee asymmetry, and no language use without orientational subjectivity as well, via deixis” (Sternberg 2001, 115). There is always a point of view – in real life narratives no less than in historiographic and fictitious ones. But perspectivity involves of course more than view. Perspectivity is anchored in different kinds of orders or “codes”, for example semiotic orders (e.g. linguistic structures), socio-cultural orders (e.g. behavioral norms, norms of gender, masternarratives), epistemic orders (e.g. habits or principles of thinking, scientific norms), historical orders (e.g. participation in a historical paradigm or paradigmatic changes, historiographical schemata) or embodied orders (e.g. perceptual habits, skills). This is where recursion – an important property of complex systems – comes into play (see Figure 1): One dynamically creates structures and orders by means of translation, but these orders, again, “sediment” (see Koschorke 2012, 24), gain a certain “fixity” or “stability” (“Verfestigung der Semiose”, Koschorke 2012, 166) – and then become (integrated in) a “code”. Consequently, these coded orders become part of one’s perspectivity and will exert an influence on further “translations” (i.e., ways of ordering). This is a feedback-loop that is well-known in cognitive science and also in (cognitive) narratology.18 But there is a second, more extensive feedback-loop, which takes into account that codes themselves are not excluded from the dialectics between the construction and deconstruction of orders. Just as societies and cultures are constituted by a complex network of embedded “semiospheres”, there is also a variety of codes, both on the level of the individual and on a variety of supraindividual levels. The sphere of science, for instance, knows different epistemological orders, which often cause frictions between different scientific branches. We may also think of the sphere of “society” (especially a society inhabited by different ethnic groups); 18 It is important, for example, for Monika Fludernik’s (1996) theory in the context of the “embodiment of cognitive categories” (1996, 19) and of “literary acculturation” (44). Fludernik’s emphasis on the “familiarization of the strange” in the course of narrativisation (inspired by Jonathan Culler’s concept of naturalisation) is also consistent with our semiotic model, inasmuch as it denotes the process of assimilating things to an order that one is already familiar with (and that thus structures one’s perspectivity). Moreover, Fludernik highlights the role that irreducible diversity plays for narrativity: “Stories, lives, the products of conversation are all concepts of the human mind, the result of cognitive parameters which we bring to bear upon the flux of unknowable and indivisible being, upon our exposure to the world” (Fludernik 1996, 41, emphasis mine).

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many different cultural orders (or codes, from behavioral codes to dress codes) may clash in that sphere. There is thus an irreducible diversity of codes, and whether one of these codes (within a certain semiosphere) gains importance, loses its validity, becomes modified, is being merged with or integrated into another code, depends again on (societal, cultural, cognitive) dynamics of ordering. I would like to illustrate the basic mechanism illustrated in Figure 1 by Aleida Assmann’s (2011) distinction between “functional” and “storage” memory (to which Koschorke refers as well in his general narrative theory, see Koschorke 2012, 215–219). Her distinction applies to the memory of both individuals and of cultures. With regard to individual memory, Assmann notes that the distinction “draws a flexible and hence productive boundary between, on the one side, chosen, interpreted, and appropriated elements – that is, those that are attached to the configuration of a story – and, on the other side, the amorphous mass of unattached elements” (Assmann 2011, 125). With regard to cultural memory, Assmann explains that Functional memory [. . .] consists of vital recollections that emerge from a process of selection, connection, and meaningful configuration [. . .]. In functional memory, unstructured, unconnected fragments are invested with perspective and relevance; they enter into connections, configurations, compositions of meaning – a quality that is totally absent from storage memory. (Assmann 2011, 127, orig. emphasis)

Storage memory, by contrast, functions as an “archive”, “preserving more and other memories than are considered relevant by the present frames of functional memory” (Assmann 2011, 128). As Assmann emphasises, the two are, in a way, interdependent, since each mode serves as a corrective for the other: “Functional memory cut off from the historical archive degenerates into fantasy, whereas the archive cut off from pratical use and interest remains a mass of meaningless information” (Assmann 2011, 132). As Figure 1 suggests, I propose to distinguish, especially with regard to narrativity, between two dimensions of order, illustrated as two axes: the paradigmatic (vertical) and the syntagmatic (horizontal) (see section 2.5.7 and Wagner 2017).19 The opposition between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic can be

19 Lotman (2001), in his semiotic analysis of the generation of texts, also refers to the opposition between the paradigmatic (described as symbolic, iconic, non-discrete and spatial) and the syntagmatic (described as verbal, narrative, discrete and temporal), designating therewith two types of sign (see Lotman 2001, 77). He assumes that, during the generation of texts, paradigmatic signs are translated into the syntagmatic system, and vice versa. Since ‘translation’, in Lotman’s theory, does not mean a perfect, frictionless transmission of information, but rather an approximate transposition that necessarily creates new information, he notes: “Iconic (spatial, non-discrete) texts and the verbal (discrete, linear) ones are mutually untranslated, and cannot

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considered to play a role on different narrative levels. Generally speaking, the creation of a “story” out of an amorphous mass of “happenings” often means selecting (paradigmatically) certain elements and providing them with a chronological shape (syntagmatically).20 Correspondingly, the plot of a story consists typically of a chain of events; the story then evolves syntagmatically. Nonetheless, this syntagmatic order is paralleled by various paradigmatic relationships (see e.g. Warning 2001; Frank 2005). Ryan (1991; 2005c), for instance, has argued, that readers construct alternative plot lines, which form a virtual plot network.21 As the iconic, spatial nature of this network suggests, narrative plots have, in such cases, a virtual, paradigmatic dimension.22 Moreover, as the vertical lines on the side of coherence (see Figure 1) suggest, syntagms (like the plot syntagm) can be analysed by means of different paradigms or categories, for example paradigms of characters (antagonists, helpers), events (events pertaining to the beginning, to the middle, or the end) or symbolic paradigms (see Lotman’s [2001, 86] reflections on the “symbolic ‘alphabet’” of specific poets or Barthes’s [2000] idea of a “symbolic code”23). The opposition between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic also matters on the next higher level of discourse: The creation of a narrative “discourse” means choosing (paradigmatically) between certain parameters of representation

in principle express ‘one and the same’ content. At the points where they confront each other there is an increase in indeterminacy and this creates a reserve for more information” (Lotman 2001, 77). In other words, for Lotman, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic are codes that undergo themselves acts of translation. My figure is thus, at first sight, not entirely consistent with – or rather: does not highlight – this view, since both the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic show up on the two sides of Figure 1, which are separated by a process of translation. Nonetheless, this does not contradict Lotman’s theory because of recursion: what, on a basic level, may be analysed as acts of translation between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic results in an order (e.g., in the coherence of a novel) that possesses (and combines) the two dimensions. (And if this order becomes the object of a new act of translation, a new order with even more dimensions may be created – and so on. Complexity then increases.) 20 This can be said at least about ‘mimetic’ narratives. Avantgarde-narratives, such as RobbeGrillet’s La Jalousie, do of course challenge the norm of syntagmatic coherence. 21 I elaborate in greater detail on Ryan’s plot networks on section 6.2.1. 22 The paradigmatic dimension of plot can even exist independently from any virtuality, namely in narratives that do not only provoke readers to imagine alternative plots, but offer by themselves several alternative plot lines without deciding which one is (fictionally) factual. 23 “The five codes mentioned, frequently heard simultaneously, in fact endow the text with a kind of plural quality (the text is actually polyphonic), but of the five codes, only three establish permutable, reversible connections, outside the constraint of time (the semic, cultural, and symbolic codes)” (Barthes 2000, 30).

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(e.g. showing versus telling, internal versus zero focalisation, direct speech versus free indirect discourse, etc.). Thirdly, also the level of the “presentation of the discourse” brings these two dimensions into play, depending on how one understands this level. If one conceives of it in terms of materiality, avant-garde literature and postmodern narratives can be said to use this level in order to challenge norms of syntagmatic ordering – for instance, when the narrative consists “of piles of unbound or unnumbered pages, which the reader must arrange into an order for it to be apprehended (B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, 1969) or [when the narrative] take[s] the form of thirteen playing cards that can be arranged in multiple possible orders (Robert Coover’s ‘Heart Suite’, 2005)” (Brian Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 77).24 As I have argued elsewhere in greater detail, not only narratives negotiate between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, but also narratology (see Wagner 2017). There is an irreducible diversity of narratological contributions, a narratological “archive” that comprises decades of research, and narratology tries to cope with this diversity by providing it with both a syntagmatic shape (e.g., narratology’s infancy, adolescence, first and second adult phase, see Alber and Fludernik 2010) and with a host of paradigmatic categories (prestructuralist, classical, postclassical narratology; within the paradigm of postclassical narratology, a plurality of new paradigms: postmodern narratology, philosophic narratology, pragmatic narratology etc., see Nünning and Nünning 2002). On the one hand, narratologists do thus provide the large archive of narrative theories with a syntagmatic shape; on the other hand, they paradigmatise theories that develop historically, i.e. that are part of a syntagm of successively appearing and developing approaches to narrativity. While each of these paradigmatic and syntagmatic systematisations translates narratology’s diversity into an order, all systematisations together accumulate, become an (itself unordered) archive and thus form a part of a new irreducible diversity (which, of course, may undergo “translation” again, see the large feedback-loop in Figure 1). What is or should be the consequence of this insight? I would like to draw two conclusions. Firstly, the insight into the three epistemic irreducibilities of the semiotic circle, that is, into the interplay of chaos and order and its circular causalities (see Figure 1) relativises the goal of developing an ultimate order (as it is illustrated by the right side in Figure 1) – be it an ultimate systematic

24 This does of course not mean that the syntagmatic principle of ordering is irrelevant in these contexts: it is, so to speak, present through its (partial) absence, as a break with the norms, as the recipient’s broken expectation of a syntagmatic order.

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model of narrativity or of its narratological meta-orders. Nevertheless, one cannot (and, perhaps, should not) prevent developing models and order (like I do by working with Figure 1), since there is an irreducible need for order, structure or coherence (‘homo ordinans’). Understanding is based upon establishing relationships, and this amounts to the development of structures (be it, on the physical level, the development of neural networks, or on the level of mental representations, the development of mental models or of semantic networks). As long as doing scientific research means pursuing the goal of understanding, one will (have to) develop structures. Nonetheless, once the possibility of an ultimate order is put into question, due to the circular connectedness of chaos and order, one should perhaps place the focus elsewhere: on the modelling of the dynamic interplay of chaos and order, on the processes that transform diversity into structure (even in one’s own work) or – in Lotman’s terminology – on the translations that take place at the borderlines (or, as Koschorke [2012] puts it, “thresholds”) between two semiospheres and two codes. But how? This question should not be underestimated. If Koschorke motivates his use of Lotman’s semiotic theory by saying that it “provides conceptional tools that allow comprehension of the interlocking of the tendencies to give structure and to destroy structure” (Koschorke 2012, 119, emphasis and translation mine), then he points to a fundamental problem according to which one cannot think (describe or theorise) what cannot be expressed. Does this simply mean that we are in need of a terminology? Yes – and no. Yes, because a new terminology – such as Lotman’s specific notions of “semiosphere”, “code” or “translation” – enables new ways of thinking, new ways of conceptualising. No, because we touch on a more fundamental problem that concerns the relationship between thought and language. Let us therefore turn back to Figure 1. What if thought pertains to the left side and language to the right side of Figure 1? What if thoughts only gain their structure through an act of “translating” them into language? What becomes questionable, then, is the possibility to express, to verbalise and thus to think the left and the middle part of Figure 1 at all. If language lives by structure and if our thoughts are shaped by our language, how can we think disorder at all?25

25 Does not even the word “disorder” contain, positively, the word-idea of “order” and poorly tries to express its absence by prefixing it negatively with the syllabe “dis-”? Does this morphosyntactic compound not create a binary structure, composed of two domains: “disorder” (or orderneg) versus “order” (or orderpos)? And is the binary conceptual space created by this word not radically at odds with the chaotic, unstructured, fluctuating multiplicity that the word “disorder” originally should denote (and enable us to think)?

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These reflections bring us to our second conclusion. In order to theorise the dynamic interplay of chaos and order in narrativity and narratology, one needs – as an epistemolic guideline, so to speak – an approach that, firstly, focuses on the dialectics between order and disorder; that, secondly, provides a terminology that allows to refer to these dialectics; and that, finally, also reflects upon the consequences that these dialectis have for their own claims and conceptual orders. To put this last point differently, what is necessary is an approach that is aware of the “partiality” of language in the competition between order and disorder and faces the consequences that the problematic role of language has for its own linguistic constitution. This is where Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizome comes into play.

1.5 The rhizome, its intricacies and its added value for narrative theory When Deleuze and Parnet state that “language is not neutral, not informative” (2007, 22) and talk about “[b]eing like a foreigner in one’s own language” (2007, 4) (or about “making a minority use of language”, 2007, 23), then they express, on the one hand, an awareness of a constitutive mismatch between thought and language, and, on the other, make a proposition as to how to deal with this mismatch. They make a case for subverting the alienating order that governs language by means of a purposefully inadequate, deconstructive linguistic performance (“to stammer in one’s own language”, Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 4). Correspondingly, Deleuze and Parnet reject language as a means of description: Les énoncés ne se contentent pas de décrire des états de choses correspondants: ce sont plutôt comme deux formalisations non parallèles, formalisation d’expression et formalisation de contenu, telles qu’on ne fait jamais ce qu’on dit, on ne dit jamais ce qu’on fait, mais on ne ment pas pour autant, on ne trompe et on ne se trompe pas pour autant, on agence seulement des signes et des corps comme pièces hétérogènes de la même machine. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 86)26

But how is it possible then to verbally represent Deleuzian philosophy? If one tries to describe Deleuze’s thoughts “correctly” in spite of his stand against both just description (see above) and correctness (see below), one risks being

26 “Utterances are not content to describe corresponding states of things: these are rather, as it were, two non-parallel formalizations, the formalization of expression and the formalization of content, such that one never does what one says, one never says what one does, although one is not lying, one is not deceiving or being deceived, one is only assembling signs and bodies as heterogeneous components of the same machine” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 71).

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read as not having understood his and Parnet’s philosophy. “La justice, la justesse, sont des mauvaises idées. Y opposer la formule de Godard: pas une image juste, juste une image. C’est la même chose en philosophie [. . .]: pas d’idées justes, juste des idées” (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 15).27 Perhaps one might find a solution by searching for what the authors propose instead of a correct description (or of a descriptive correctness). “Il ne faut pas chercher si une idée est juste ou vraie. Il faudrait chercher une toute autre idée, ailleurs, dans un autre domaine, telles qu’entre les deux quelque chose passe, qui n’est ni dans l’une ni dans l’autre” (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 16, emphasis mine).28 This idea of betweenness is (if I may use such an anti-Deleuzian-since-centralising imagery) “at the heart” of Deleuzian philosophy, which is expressed predominantly in spatial terms.29 Betweenness plays a role, for instance, in Deleuze’s rejection of interpretation, the latter meaning in Deleuzian terminology an effort of deciphering, “justly”, a specific meaning supposed to inhere in a text. Deleuze rejects this idea because it does not take account of many relationships that are constitutive for texts (such as relationships between the interpreter and the text, the text and its author, the author and the world, the world and the text, the interpreter and the author, the world and the interpreter) nor of the many “multiplicities” and “orders” that inhere in each of these instances: Un agencement dans sa multiplicité travaille à la fois forcément sur des flux sémiotiques, des flux matériels et des flux sociaux [. . .]. On n’a plus une triparition entre un champ de réalité, le monde, un champ de representation, le livre, et un champ de subjectivité, l’auteur. Mais un agencement met en connexion certaines multiplicités prises dans chacun de ces ordres, si bien qu’un livre n’a pas de suite dans le livre suivant, ni son objet dans le monde, ni son sujet dans un ou plusieurs auteurs. Bref, il nous semble que l’écriture ne se fera jamais assez au nom d’un dehors. Le dehors n’a pas d’image, ni de signification, ni de subjectivité. Le livre, agencement avec le dehors, contre le livre-image du monde. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 33–34)30

27 “Justice and correctness are bad ideas. Compare Godard’s formula; not a correct image, just an image [. . .]. It is the same in philosophy [. . .]: no correct ideas, just ideas” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 9). 28 “You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 10, emphasis mine). 29 Due to this spatial imagery, Deleuze’s ideas are partly very close to Lotman’s (2001) semiotic theory, which equally works with spatial concepts, such as “sphere”, “centre”, “periphery”, “borderline”, etc. 30 “An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously [. . .]. There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from

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The irreducible interplay of chaos and order (illustrated in Figure 1), which Gibson characterises as an “irreducible doubleness” of representation and scepticism about representation (see above), is condensed in the Deleuzian term agencement (“assemblage”): it “acts on [. . .] flows” – and thus works towards fixation, stabilisation, or sedimentation; and if the “assemblage” acts on “semiotic”, “material” and “social” flows, then different “codes”, i.e. different (sub-)types of orders participate in the creation of a new order that “assembles” (elements of) the subcodes in a new way, precisely by establishing new kinds of relationships between the elements of their irreducible diversity. If Deleuze and Guattari say that there “is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)”, then they criticise, in a way, the tripartite order established by us (see Figure 1), for this order is itself an “assemblage”, i.e. a fixed, somehow arbitrary order that contrasts with the flows upon which it has acted. For Deleuze, the fallacy of “interpretation” thus consists, firstly, in the idea of annihilating oneself by merging with the text and its meaning. One cannot avoid staying in place, establishing connections between the multiplicities that constitute oneself, the text and the world. The reader thus forms an assemblage with the text. Secondly, the fallacy of interpretation consists in misunderstanding the nature of “meaning”. If meaning is nothing but an assemblage, then “representing” a meaning by means of verbal paraphrasis (which amounts to creating a new verbal “assemblage”) without changing it is impossible, especially with regard to the multiplicity of instances and of codes that are the point of departure for any assemblage (i.e. for any order).31 Deleuze’s claims, however, have a strong self-referential dimension. How can we (and by what right do we) interpret and represent a notion that serves to negate the very ideas of interpretation and representation? Deleuze and Parnet give themselves an answer:

each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 22–23). 31 Considered from this angle, Barthes, for instance, provides a quite Deleuzian reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes does not interpret Balzac’s text, but treats it as an assemblage, working towards the discovery of the multiplicity of codes that inhere in it (see Barthes 2000).

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C’est la bonne manière de lire: tous les contresens sont bons, à condition qu’ils ne consistent pas en interprétations, mais qu’ils concernent l’usage du livre, qu’ils en multiplient l’usage, qu’ils fassent encore une langue à l’intérieur de sa langue. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 11)32

Deleuze thus replaces the “interpretation” of texts by the “use” of texts. I will take this plea for the “use” of texts as well as his devaluation of “correctness” as an encouragement to work with Deleuze’s philosophy, despite (and in consideration of) the intricacy of the latter. However, my way of talking about Deleuze will run between the way he proposes to take (“use” instead of “interpretation”) and the way he condemns (“correct” interpretation). Concerning the former, I will “use” his theory by establishing relationships between elements of Deleuze’s philosophy and other fields of inquiry, including narrativity, narratology, semiotics, cognitive science and others. Together, they will form (to speak in Deleuzian terms) a kind of “assemblage”: a “becoming-Deleuze” of narratology and a “becoming-narratology” of Deleuze, as an “aparallel evolution” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 10). Concerning the the way of “correct interpretation”, I would rather join Umberto Eco (1990), who sees more possibilities than Deleuze. Eco distinguishes between the free use of a text, serving as an imaginary stimulus (which seems to overlap, at least partly, with Deleuze’s idea of “use”), the interpretation of a “closed” text (which seems to correspond to Deleuze’s concept of “interpretation”) and the interpretation of an “open” text (see Eco 1990, 69–74). According to Eco, an “open text” is composed so as to be used as freely as possible (see Eco 1990, 73). Considering Deleuze’s texts as “open texts”, I will “interpret” them in the way defended by Eco, who thinks that the concept of interpretation always involves a dialectic between the strategies of the author and the answer of the model-reader. Although my strategy of reading Deleuze does not exactly comply with what Deleuze himself proposes (since I do not completely renounce norms of “correct” reading or interpretation), it seems to me that my approach is, nonetheless, consistent with his theory; not only because Deleuze himself, who repeatedly denounces structures of power, would probably not want to be “obeyed”, but also because Deleuze argues that any normative binarism (such as that between good “use” versus bad “interpretation”) should become deconstructed: “Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 10). Moreover, my approach is consistent

32 “This is the good way to read: all mistranslations are good – always provided that they do not consist in interpretations, but relate to the use of the book, that they multiply its use, that they create yet another language inside its language” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 5).

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with Deleuze’s theory in that my way of talking about Deleuze runs between the approaches he prefers and he rejects, as well as between his and Eco’s understanding of “interpretation” – and betweenness is, obviously, a fundamental dimension of his epistemic stance. Entre les choses ne désigne pas une relation localisable qui va de l’une à l’autre et réciproquement, mais une direction perpendiculaire, un mouvement transversal qui les emporte l’une et l’autre, ruisseau sans début ni fin, qui ronge ses deux rives et prend de la vitesse au milieu. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 37, orig. emphasis)33

My use and interpretation of Deleuze will be focussed on the notion of the ‘rhizome’. It is difficult to “describe” what Deleuze’s rhizome “means” – not (only) because of Deleuze’s rejection of descriptions and of reproductions of meanings, but rather because the rhizome is not a conceptual object around which one could simply draw a line, that is, which one could simply “de-fine”.34 More precisely, the rhizome denotes a kind of betweenness insofar as it is itself at the crossroads (or: in the middle) of other Deleuzian thoughts and terms (such as “assemblage”, “speed”, “intensity”, “deterritorialisation”, “reterritorialisation”, “line of flight”, “multiplicity”, the “AND” instead of “IS”, “n-1”, etc.). Betweenness, in this context, does not simply mean that all these notions are somehow related to the rhizome: the rhizome itself exists only in terms of this plurality (“multiplicity”) of notions, and in terms of the conceptual connections between them. Can one thus imagine the rhizome as a network? Can one conceptualise the rhizome by drawing a network-like mindmap that visualises how these concepts are related with each other? Indeed, the network illustrates one of the rhizome’s most important characteristics, namely connectivity: “any point of rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 7). Deleuze and Guattari themselves use the word “network” in the context of the rhizome (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 17) and invoke it, implicitly, by referring to the structure of the brain (which is a neural network): La pensée n’est pas arborescente, et le cerveau n’est pas une matière enracinée ni ramifiée. [. . .] La discontinuité des cellules, le rôle des axons, le fonctionnement des synapses,

33 “Between things does not deisgnate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 25, orig. emphasis). 34 The verb “to define” (from Latin dēfïnīre) also means “to determine the limits of” something. See “define.” 2003. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Edited by Terry F. Hoad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed 22 March 2017. http://www.oxfordrefer ence.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192830982.001.0001/acref-9780192830982-e-4016.

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l’existence de micro-fentes synaptiques, le saut de chaque message par-dessus ces fentes, font du cerveau une multiplicité qui baigne, dans son plan de consistance ou dans sa glie, tout un système probabiliste incertain, uncertain nervous system. Beaucoup de gens ont un arbre planté dans la tête, mais le cerveau lui-même est une herbe beaucoup plus qu’un arbre. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 24)35

Nonetheless, I see at least two important incompatibilities between the rhizome and the network.36 Firstly, representing the rhizome as a network of concepts is radically at odds with the dynamic nature of the rhizome. By drawing a network, one fixes the rhizome as a particular out of a host of possible conceptual orders, representing it as something fixed, although Deleuze always underscores the essentially dynamical nature of the rhizome (“transversal movement”, “semiotic flows”). For Deleuze and Parnet, “[t]rue Entities are events, not concepts. It is not easy to think in terms of event. All the harder since thought itself then becomes an event” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 66). Correspondingly, while the network is a spatially structured image, the rhizome connects the spatial with the temporal code (“Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line!”, Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 24). Indeed, all kinds of dimensions, of orders and codes may be connected in a rhizome, and it is the process of connecting that is crucial for the rhizome. It is, secondly, problematic to conceptualise the rhizome via a network because one would finish up with an ordered and finite unity, with some concepts being in the centre, others in the periphery of the network. The rhizome, by contrast, tries to convey the idea of a multiplicity without unity (“n-1”), without a beginning and an end (only middles), with “multiple entryways”, without any centre (everything is susceptible of being (in) the centre) and without any fixed order. Un rhizome ne commence et n’aboutit pas, il est toujours au milieu, entre les choses, interêtre, intermezzo. L’arbre est filiation, mais le rhizome est alliance, uniquement alliance. L’arbre impose le verbe ‘être’, mais le rhizome a pour tissu la conjonction ‘et . . . et . . . et’. Il y a dans cette conjonction assez de force pour secouer et déraciner le verbe être. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 36)37

35 “Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. [. . .] The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system [. . .]. Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 15). 36 These two incompatibilities do not concern Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the neural network because of the ‘plasticity’ of the latter. 37 “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree

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The contrast between “et” (“and”) and “est” (“is”), highlighted by Deleuze and Guattari in this paragraph, directly concerns everyone who tries to explain the rhizome, since explaining (and understanding) seems to involve “is”-constructions. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who claim that “[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3), sustain the hypothesis that “[t]he essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 5). The conceptual metaphors that they analyse work through Deleuze’s “est”, for example ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 4) or COMMUNICATION IS SENDING (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 10). Interestingly, one of the conceptual metaphors listed by Lakoff and Johnson is IDEAS ARE OBJECTS (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 10) – which is not only the conceptual metaphor that would underlie a conceptualisation of the rhizome as a network, but also the cognitive metaphor against which the rhizome makes a stand. The rhizome counters this way of thinking, which equally structures our language and thought, by implementing the “et” (“and”). If the “est” creates structure (conceptual metaphors, linguistic expressions, orders of thinking), the “et” works towards their deconstruction and fluidisation. The “et” shields that the understanding (that proceeds through “est”) comes to a halt and keeps it in a process of dynamic expansion and renewal. It adds new things to the rhizome, creates new relationships, new kinds of betweenness, new multiplicities. Il faut aller plus loin: faire que la rencontre avec les relations pénètre et corrompe tout, mine l’être, le fasse basculer. Substituer le ET au EST. A et B. Le ET n’est même pas une relation ou une conjonction particulières, il est ce qui sous-tend toutes les relations, la route de toutes les relations, et qui fait filer les relations hors de leurs termes et hors de l’ensemble de leurs termes, et hors de tout ce qui pourrait être déterminé comme Etre, Un ou Tout. Le ET comme extra-être, inter-être. [. . .] le ET donne une autre direction aux relations, et fait fuir les termes et les ensembles, les uns et les autres, sur la ligne de fuite qu’il crée activement. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 71)38

imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 25). 38 “One must go further: one must make the encounter with relations penetrate and corrupt everything, undermine being, make it topple over. Substitute the AND for IS. A and B. The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole. The AND is extra-being, inter-being. [. . .] the AND gives relations another direction, and puts to flight terms and sets, the former and the latter on the line of flight which it actively creates” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 57).

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This rhizomatic “et” is responsible for the fact that one cannot define the rhizome by saying “The rhizome is . . . ” (e.g., a network, a mode of thinking, an epistemology, a criticism of Western thought, etc.), precisely because the rhizome is many things (a “multiplicity”, “n-1”) and the betweenness between these many things (“lines of flight”) and the assemblage of such kinds of betweenness (“reterritorialisation”) and the changes that go on in this assemblage (“deterritorialisation”) – and so on. One can see here that understanding the rhizome affects one’s language, since the rhizome fights structures, refers to what is not structure and can thus not be caught by a language-thought system that lives by structures. Consequently, one has thus two possibilities. Either one speaks, as Deleuze himself proposes, in another (“minority”) language (e.g. the Deleuzian language, whose existence is affirmed, in a way, by the existence of Deleuzian dictionaries, see Sasso 2003; Parr 2010 [2005]), which is unintelligible for all those who do not “speak” this idiosyncratic language, or one speaks in one’s ordinary language, but then one will probably fail to leave one’s order of thought and language and thus fail the rhizome. The (ordinary) language reproduces its own structures and meaning, or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself” (1988, 13). Indeed, even these alternative ways of speaking are, in a way, thematised by Deleuze and Guattari. Their vocabulary is again a spatial one, as the ideas of “deterritorialisation” and “reterritorialisation” suggest. If the idea of a “territory” refers to the structures, systems, orders and assemblages that one is familiar with (be it the grammar of a language, the geography of one’s home city or the structure of a concept, of a culture, etc.), then “deterritorialisation” (and “line of flight”) refers to leaving this safe area, to exposing oneself to alien (or dis-)orders, to letting new structures transform the established ones (be it by learning a foreign language, straying in an unknown or unstructured place, or exposing oneself to another culture). But since leaving somewhere means arriving somewhere else, and since transformation leads to the emergence of new structure, or (as one could say with regard to Figure 1) since translation is a process that (provisionally) ends on a new order, “deterritorialisation” has “reterritorialisation” as its counterpart, and the two do not cease to take turns. “It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 20). In other words, one cannot avoid being kept in the semiotic circle, which produces continually new orders, distinctions or dichotomies, which, always anew, become part of an irreducible diversity (or multiplicity) that is governed by no order at all.

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We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 20)

The basic dualism established by Deleuze and Guattari, which they thus deconstruct themselves at the end of their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, is that between arborescent structures and the rhizome, or, quasi interchangeably, between trees and grass (or weed). They thus borrow (or rather, as they put it, “deterritorialise”) terms from botany and integrate them into their (language of) philosophy. In botany, a rhizome is a rootstock, that is, a subterranean (sometimes also aerial) stem that sends out shoots and roots from its nodes. Rhizomes may have different forms. For instance, they can take a web-like form, like in the case of the mycelium of a fungus; mushrooms are nothing but the fruits sent out by the subterranean organ, which is a widespread filamentous network structure. As storage organs, they can also take more bulb-like forms, as in the case of the ginger rhizome. However, what in the present context is more important than biological knowledge about the exact properties of the rhizome, is the question of which properties of the rhizome are highlighted by Deleuze and Guattari, and against what these properties stand.39 Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizome 39 That they do not stick too much to the exact botanical sense of the rhizome becomes evident when they ask – shortly after having introduced the rhizome as something that may adequately express the idea of “n-1” (multiplicity without unity) – “whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 6): a question that extends the biological scope of denotation of the rhizome. Then they go on applying the rhizome even to zoology: “Even some animals are [rhizomes, ESW], in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 6–7). These examples provide the initial characteristic of the rhizome (“multiplicity without unity”, “n-1”) with variants: collectivity (pack), polyfunctionality (functions of burrows), heteromorphism (forms of rhizomes). This already hints at an epistemic attitude on the side of Deleuze and Guattari that is oriented towards inexactitude, i.e. towards a lack of correspondence between two terms (form/function; parts/whole): a pack consists of an undetermined number of individuals and it stays a pack despite significant changes concerning the individuals that constitute it (death, replacement by new individuals); a plant rhizome cannot be defined by its structure, it is not a web or a bulb, but it may take different forms; concerning the burrow, there is also no 1:1 correspondence between form and function; the form of each burrow and its different uses depend on its concrete environment. A first correlation may be drawn here between the rhizome and literary theory: Meir Sternberg’s often invoked “Proteus Principle”, that thematises “the interplay of unity and variety in reported discourse, with particular emphasis on its representational facet” (Sternberg 1982, 110), makes a related claim: that there are “many-to-many correspondences between linguistic form and representational function” (Sternberg 1982, 112).

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with arborescent structures, which represent an epistemology that follows the principles of exactitude and of clear-cut oppositions and distinctions. Arborescent structures refer to the organisation of knowledge by means of binarisms (as opposed to rhizomatic multiplicity), of classifications according to the principle of “either-or” (as opposed to Deleuze’s “et”), of hierarchical organisation (as opposed to horizontal and “transversal” interconnections) and in terms of lineage, genealogy and history (as opposed to “antigenealogy” and “nomadology”, see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 21, 23). “In Deleuze’s works on epistemology and ontology, he identifies Plato’s Forms, the models of the subject espoused by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, as well as the ‘Absolute Spirit’ of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as examples [of tree-like structures]” (Stagoll 2010, 14). As Stagoll notes, Deleuze’s model calls to mind a much older model of arborescent structure, namely the “porphyrian tree” (see Stagoll 2010, 15). This arbor porphyriana is, since Petrus Hispanus, a commonly used term in medieval logics. It refers to the way the ancient philosopher Porphyry models, in Isagoge, relations of super- and subordination and differentiates between ‘genus’, ‘species’ and ‘differentia’ (see Baumgartner 1971). Boethius summarised Porphyry’s reflections by means of a schema that resembles a tree (see Baumgartner 1971). Medieval philosophers used arborescent patterns in an attempt to give order to human knowledge, e.g. Roman Llull’s “Arbor Scientiae”.40 Deleuze and Guattari find it “odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy” (1988, 18). While tree structures help to conceptualise the world via distinct categories, the rhizome counterbalances the effect of arborescent thinking by focussing on what is between these categories, on what connects them. “Grass is the only way out. . . . The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, among other things” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 19). In this regard, the opposition between arborescent and rhizomatic thinking mirrors a more recent epistemological opposition, namely that between analytical and systemic thinking (see Capra 1996). While analytical thinking divides the world into objects, or, more generally, things into parts, systemic thinking is characterised by an epistemological “shift from the parts to the whole”. A first commonality between rhizomatic and systems thinking may be derived from the systemic perspective according to which “throughout the living world we find systems nesting within other systems” (Capra 1996, 37). Consequently, everything is

40 For an overview on arborescent schemata in the Early Modern Age, see Siegel (2009), especially 57–90. For a contextualisation of Llull’s arbor scientiae with regard to his fundamental philosophical convictions (realism, transcendence), see Jaulent (1998).

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connected to everything (else), as is claimed by Deleuze and Guattari’s first and second “principles of connection and heterogeneity” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 7). Secondly, “systemic thinking is ‘contextual’ thinking; and since explaining things in terms of their context means explaining them in terms of their environment, we can also say that systems thinking is environmental thinking” (Capra 1996, 37). That this aspect is also crucial for the rhizome becomes obvious, for example, in Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts about “[t]he wisdom of plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human beings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 11). If Capra, thirdly, states that “[f]or the systems thinker the relationships are primary” (Capra 1996, 37), and that the systems thinker thinks in terms of networks, his ideas comply with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the rhizome as an assemblage, i.e. as an “increase in the dimensions of the multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 8). Where Deleuze and Guattari criticise the tree as a structure of epistemological organisation, systems thinker criticise the metaphor of knowledge as a building (see Capra 1996, 38–39). Finally, both systems thinking and rhizomatic thinking have a problem with “the traditional concept of scientific objectivity. In the Cartesian paradigm scientific descriptions are believed to be objective – that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. The new paradigm implies that epistemology – understanding the process of knowing – has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomena” (Capra 1996, 40). It seems to me that Deleuze shares this rejection of objectivity – for the very reason that scientific objectivity relies on an epistemological hierarchy that comprises two levels: that of the represented and that of representation, that of the signified and the signifier. Il n’y a pas de différence entre ce dont un livre parle et la manière dont il est fait. Un livre n’a donc pas davantage d’objet. En tant qu’agencement, il est seulement lui-même en connexion avec d’autres agencements, par rapport à d’autres corps sans organes. On ne demandera jamais ce que veut dire un livre, on se demandera avec quoi il fonctionne, en connexion de quoi il fait ou non passer des intensités, dans quelles multiplicités il introduit et métamorphose la sienne, avec quels corps sans organes il fait lui-même converger le sien. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 10)41

41 “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book

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Deleuze and Parnet summarise, in a way, the opposition between analytical and systems thinking in the context of their considerations on empiricism. [. . .] en effet, si les relations sont extérieures et irréductibles à leurs termes, la différence ne peut pas être entre le sensible et l’intelligible, entre l’expérience et la pensée, entre les sensations et les idées, mais seulement entre deux sortes d’idées, ou deux sortes d’expériences, celles des termes et celle des relations. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 70)42

The rhizome not only stands against arborescent structures, binarisms and dichotomies, as they occur in contemporary theories (for instance, in Chomsky’s generative grammar). It stands against “pretraced” structures in general.43 Deleuze and Guattari formulate the rhizomatic “principle of asignifying rupture” against this fixation of structures, against inflexible “segmentarity, strata and territories” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 3) and “against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9). This principle refers to the interlinkage of processes of re- and deterritorialisation. A rhizome comprises both “segmentary lines” that produce structure (strata, a territory, an organisation, meaning, power) and “lines of flight” that deconstruct the latter – and both result in each other. “You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organisations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9). This dynamics of re- and deterritorialisation also motivates the “principle of cartography and decalcomania” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12), which opposes the logic of “tracing and reproduction” to the activity of “making a map” and counters “competence” by “performance”. Tracing and reproducing something means to represent, with more or less competence, a preexisting structure. A map, by contrast, has the character of a performance inasmuch as it “is open and

means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connections with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 4). 42 “[. . .] in effect if relations are external and irreducible to their terms, then the difference cannot be between the sensible and the intelligible, between experience and thought, between sensations and ideas, but only between two sorts of ideas, or two sorts of experiences, that of terms and that of relations” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 55–56). 43 This seems to be the reason for Deleuze and Parnet’s rejection of psychoanalysis, where the structure of the unconscious and thus the route of “interpretation” is predetermined, independently of who the patient is and what s/he says (see Deleuze and Parnet 2007, Chapter 3).

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connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12). While “tracing” and “reproducing” stand in the logic of structure and objectivity, “making a map” (cartography, decalcomania) stands in the logic of change, connectivity, performance and perspectivity – aspects that also play a prominent role in our semiotic circle as well (see Figure 1). Inasmuch as Deleuze and Guattari focus on the dynamics of change and of deconstruction (“deterritorialisation”) rather than on the dynamics of ordering and on the structures born out of it (“territorialisation”), it does not come as a surprise that they deconstruct their own binarisms. The dichotomy between the tree (or the roots) and the rhizome is itself a dichotomy (a structure, a territory) and thus an instrument of power44; it thus has to undergo deconstruction. “If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad [. . .]. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 20). Earlier, we enumerated three criteria for an approach that could serve as an epistemological guideline: (i) it should focus on the theorisation of disorder and on the dialectic processes of transition between order and disorder; (ii) it should provide a terminology that allows to refer to these dialectics; (iii) it should reflect upon the consequences that its object of research – epistemological relativity – has for itself. After all that has been said so far, it should have become clear that the rhizome satisfies these three criteria. That Deleuze and Guattari conclude with the deconstruction of their own model, by rhizomatically connecting the rhizome with its arborescent counterpart, shows that they reflect upon the consequences that the epistemological relativity that they advocate has for their own approach. On the one hand, they apply the idea of the rhizome to the binarism of rhizomatic versus arborescent structures by rhizomatically connecting them, thereby validating the rhizome. On the other hand, they simultaneously deconstruct (and thus invalidate) the idea of the rhizome by rhizomatically connecting the tree and the rhizome, i.e. by destroying the very dichotomy that legitimates the rhizome. These two ways of dealing with the rhizome remain paradoxically intertwined and interdependent, in a movement of epistemic self-affirmation and –relativisation, which is highly consistent with our semiotic circle. Deleuze and Guattari cannot affirm

44 According to Deleuze and Parnet (2007, 21), “the binary machine is an important component of apparatuses of power.”

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(i.e., develop a model of) epistemological relativity and describe it with the aid of a model that is exempted from epistemological relativity. In other words, the contents of their philosophy feed back on their way of doing philosophy; the object of research retroacts on the level of description. Deleuze is very aware of this feedback-loop between philosophical theory and practice: “In my earlier books, I tried to describe a certain exercise of thought; but describing it was not yet exercising thought in that way” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 16). Deconstructivist approaches, such as Deleuze’s, have a difficult standing in many fields of literary studies, and also within narratology. This is understandable – and perhaps even a necessity –, since, in the semiotic agon between chaos and order or between static structures (and fix meanings) and dynamics (or fluxes of meaning), deconstructivist approaches underscore the latter, while science mostly aspires to results that correspond to the former.45 My aim, however, is not to support either of the two sides, but to advance narrative theory on an epistemic basis that takes account of the interdependence of the two sides (as illustrated in Figure 1), both with regard to the objects of theoretical examination (interplay of narrative order and disorder) and to the level of research itself (interplay of narratological order and disorder). The rhizome is, from my point of view, especially suited to pursue that goal because its fundamental principles and characteristics (especially the principle of connectivity, n-1, i.e. multiplicity without unity, dynamic network structures, representational and language scepticism and betweenness) can be fruitfully applied on the two levels of narratological theory proper and of narrative analysis (and between them). This assumption will have to be proven in the various chapters of the present study. Nonetheless, it might be helpful to provide a short outlook on how the added value of the rhizome for narratological purposes can broadly be understood.

45 Terminological work is an example in case. Inasmuch as terms (“Begriffe”) are “indispensable meeting points of communication” (“unentbehrliche Sammelpunkte der Verständigung”, Koschorke 2012, 167), they generally serve “the stabilisation of semiosis“ (“[. . .] stehen Begriffe im Dienst einer Verfestigung der Semiose”, Koschorke 2012, 166). Postmodern or deconstructivist theories, like Gibson’s (1996), for example, work against this semiotic stabilisation by deconstructing the terms that are “conventional within and intrinsic to established narratology” (Gibson 1996, 265). Another crucial issue are general scientific norms, like the norm of consistency (lack of contradictions). Postmodern and deconstructivist theories tend to threaten this norm, as we have seen in the example of the ‘rhizome’. Gibson, however, submits that “[t]o reconcile ourselves to contradiction, however, is also to recognise that any critique of representation will continually fall back into the positions from which it seeks to free itself. In this respect, a postmodern theory of narrative might hope, not only to be more resigned to the limitations of critique, but to grow more playful in its approach to them” (Gibson 1996, 79).

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In the second chapter, which is dedicated to the theory of narrativity proper, it is primarily the principle of connectivity as well as the dynamic interplay of hierarchical (“arborescent”) structures and transversal connections between hierarchical strata that will be used in order to develop a model of narrativity. This model combines (“arborescent”) stratification with (“rhizomatic”) transversality; it provides the chaotic jumble of narrativity with an order that, due to its hierarchical dimension and clear-cut distinctions, answers the scientific call for terminological and conceptual clarity. This hierarchical design, however, is counterbalanced by a dynamic and interactive design, which provides the model simultaneously with the necessary (“rhizomatic”) flexibility and relativity, in ontological46 and epistemic47 regards. Moreover, this model follows Deleuze’s philosophy in conceiving of narrativity as an event (“[t]rue Entities are events, not concepts”, Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 66), produced by what Deleuze would probably call a “machine” or “assemblage” whose main components are, in my model, the narrative text, the reader and diverse contexts (“The book as assemblage with the outside”, Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 22–23). All of these components are understood, for their part, as “multiplicities”, which dynamically and selectively interact with each other, establishing a rhizomatic network of idiosyncratic, time-indexed interconnections, which produce meaning effects. In a nutshell, the model that will be developed in the second chapter designs a “map”48 of narrative dimensions, which can be interconnected in various ways so as to produce variable narrativities. The third chapter, by contrast, examines the rhizomatic interconnections between narrativity and two other concepts: literariness and coherence. Part B of the present study, dedicated to the analysis of literary texts, draws on various dimensions of the rhizome in order to theorise different dimensions of the texts’ narrativities. The analysis of Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses, in chapter 4, explores a rhizomatic net of interwoven concepts (narrativity, narrative perspective, multiperspectivity, ambiguity, literariness, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic) and analyses the novel’s construction of viewpoint, polyphony and interpretative ambiguity in terms of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ideas of 46 I am referring here to the variability of narrative forms and functions, which calls for a model that is flexible enough to take account of all of them. 47 I think of the broad variety of narratological presuppositions, approaches and orientations: a model that seeks to be neutral enough to be used by scholars that advocate different narratologies has to be flexible enough to be used by all of them. 48 See Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of cartography and decalcomania, which opposes the map to the tracing, making a case for the map according to which “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model” (1988, 12). “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12).

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“et” [“AND”] and “multiplicity”. The analysis of Kafka’s Schloss, in chapter 5, touches on three rhizomatic dimensions of Kafka’s Schloss. Firstly, the novel’s syntagmatic “flatness” and its technique of “deframing” (or reinterpretation) corresponds to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of a “flat multiplicity”. Secondly, the novel creates a labyrinthine rhizomatic interpretative “burrow” in which readers roam about (instead of arriving at a meaningful end). Thirdly, the novel employs a technique of conceptual “deterritorialisation”, which is based on the establishment of strange conceptual interconnections. Interestingly, according to my analysis, Kafka’s Schloss shares a rhizomatic quality with Toussaint’s novels, namely multiplicity without unity (“n-1”) on the story level: the story lacks in both cases a hierarchical macro-structure; events are not attributable to an organising plot schema.49 This lack of a hierarchy, on the story level, is replaced in Toussaint’s prose by a rhizomatic-paradigmatic network of isotopic connections, which short-circuits the levels of story and discourse (which form, in a way, an “arborescent” opposition). In chapter 6, dedicated to Toussaint’s novels, also the dynamic dimension of the rhizome will play a role, insofar as Toussaint’s novels prevent closure. Moreover, the principle of connection will be of importance: as I will argue, Toussaint’s novels thematise, in an implicitly meta-narrative manner, the connection between narration, the subject and the real. The present study thus seeks to show, on the one hand, that the rhizome can be a useful epistemic guideline for the modeling of complex narratological phenomena, such as narrativity, and, on the other, that the rhizome represents a practicable heuristics for the analysis of literary narrativities, especially of those that do not emerge from common narrative structures and expectations. The present study thus joins the ranks of other theories, which implicitly or explicitly draw on “rhizomatic” ideas.

49 While the narrativities of the two authors can be described (inter lia) in terms of the rhizomatic principle of multiplicity without unity, there are obviously differences in the ways the novels use this principle for the construction of their plots. In Kafka’s Schloss, multiplicity without unity amounts to a withdrawal of diegetic reality as such. The diegetic world, its rules, structure and organisation remain totally obscure, such that readers roam around in the diegetic world, without any orientation, just like K. does. In Toussaint’s novels, the principle has less extreme consequences: the novel creates expectations concerning the plot schema, but refuses to fulfil them, such that the events lack a discernible conceptual unity and a direction of emplotment. The diegetic world of Toussaint is, however, not even remotely as strange and enstranging as Kafka’s. What they have in common is a lack of teleology and tellability.

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1.6 Deleuzian and rhizomatic approaches in literary and narrative theory Although there is a multitudinous number of works that use the rhizome for the analysis or interpretation of literary texts or films, the rhizome has received comparatively little attention in literary and narrative theory proper. This is hardly surprising since Deleuze’s deconstructive arguments against forms and structures and for “a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing” (Deleuze 1988, 20) are generally difficult to reconcile with (if not hostile to) theory in general. Nonetheless, some theoricians do refer to Deleuze and/or his ‘rhizome’. One of the most Deleuzian texts from the realm of literary theory indeed precedes Deleuze’s first formulation of the rhizome in 1976: Barthes’ S/Z (1974), first published in French in 1970. Barthes’s epoch-making reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine is accompanied by considerations on the nature of the readerly versus writerly text and by a quite rhizomatic conception of the latter, which emphasises “the plural of a text” (Barthes 1974, 11). According to this plural conception, “everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. [. . .] the one text is [. . .] entrance into a network with a thousand50 entrances; to take this entrance is to aim [. . .] at a perspective [. . .] whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselessly pushed back, mysteriously opened” (Barthes 1974, 12). The writerly text clearly foreshadows the rhizomatic principles of multiplicity and of asignifying rupture: “[. . .] if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network – all the movements and inflections of a vast ‘dissolve’” (Barthes 1974, 20). The five codes, for their part, “under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped” (Barthes 1974, 19), are rhizomatic in nature as well, insofar as they “create a network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text)” (20). Also Barthes’s remarks on “the work of commentary” reveal a rhizomatic attitude: “once it is separated from any ideology of totality, [it] consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it” (Barthes 1974, 15, orig. emphasis). Barthes’s thoughts and terminology can thus be said to be ‘rhizomatic’ avant la lettre.

50 The idea of a thousand entrances can be correlated with the title of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) A Thousand Plateaus.

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Another author whose theoretical considerations (and literary productions)51 are deeply influenced by the Deleuzian ‘rhizome’ is Umberto Eco. His work Lector in fabula (1990)52 refers explicitly three times to the rhizome: firstly, in the introductory chapter, where the rhizome is considered to be susceptible to theorising “the variableness of the interpretations of messages or texts or discourses” (Eco 1990, 9)53; secondly, in his chapter about “the author as an interpretative hypothesis”, where Eco argues that “reading is not a strictly hierarchical activity: it is neither taken up in a bifurcation, nor does is stroll about the main street, but it simply goes to the rhizome” (Eco 1990, 85); thirdly, in his reflections on ‘open’ and ‘closed’ stories. He invokes the rhizome as a possible way of characterising diagrammatically the functioning of ‘open’ stories, which are made up of many “openings” and of various stories that come into being at these breaks (see Eco 1990, 153). Besides these explicit references to the rhizome, there is a broad range of considerations that indirectly refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, as when he speaks about a “semiotic web” (“semiotisches Gewebe”, Eco 1990, 57), explains the complexity of texts by the fact that they are “interwoven with the un-said” (62) or describes the text as “a system of nodes or linkages” (83). Eco contends that “the interpretative cooperation consists of leaps and short circuits on different textual levels” (thereby reminding us of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “a thousand plateaus”). In this connection, he adds that “it is impossible to determine a logically ordered sequence” (Eco 1990, 123), thereby invoking the rhizomatic resistance against beginnings and ends (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 25). Also his conception of “inferential walks”, during which readers “connect” the text with their “encyclopedia” and search for “exits” within the repertoire of the alreadymentioned (thereby reminding us of Deleuze and Guattari’s “entryways”) hints to a rhizomatic philosophical attitude (see Eco 1990, 148–149). Many elements of Deleuzian philosophy, including the rhizome, have also found entrance into the “postmodern theory of narrative”, as presented by Gibson (1996). He uses a number of Deleuzian ideas both for a theoretical deconstruction of narratology and for analyses of various narrative texts. Concerning the former,

51 As Kuhn has pointed out, already Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980) uses the idea of the rhizome in order to describe labyrinthian structures. Eco explicitly refers to the first Deleuzian version of the “Rhizome” from 1976 in Postille a ‘Il nome della rosa’, where he distinguishes three kinds of rhizomatic labyrinths (see Kuhn 2013, 26). 52 As far as I know, this work, originally published in Italian in 1979, has never been translated into English. The eighth chapter of The Role of the Reader (1984) contains only some ideas from Lector in Fabula. I will therefore work with the German (1990) translation of Lector in fabula and translate the quotations by myself. 53 Here, and in following quotations of Lector in fabula (1990), translation mine.

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which is of interest for us in the present context, Gibson draws, for example, on Deleuze’s rejection of hierarchies and of Euclidean geometry in order to deconstruct instances of narratological geometry, such as the notion of narrative levels (see Gibson 1996, 23). He draws on rhizomatic (or “rhizomic”, as he puts it, see 49) terms such as ‘multiplicity’, ‘becoming’ and ‘force’, opposing them to structuralist models, oriented only towards “form”. To think segmentarity is to produce ‘a homogenous and isotopic space’, to constitute ‘fixed or ideal essences’, to collude in the ‘damage’ done by ‘geometrical injustice’ [. . .]. To think segmentarity and ‘lines of force’ together, on the other hand, is to refuse to find a logical order in a world of transformations and symbioses. It is to produce altogether more supple ‘morphological formations’ as registering force and form at once. (Gibson 1996, 53)

He also uses Deleuzian philosophy of time (aion versus chronos) in order to criticise classical narratological (more precisely, Mieke Bal’s) claims about the logical and chronological relatedness of events in a fabula: they transform time into a “neutralised, programmed [. . .] set of coordinates, rid of any disquieting eventuality, of what Deleuze would call its nomadic distributions” (Gibson 1996, 182).54 A new area of application of the rhizome within narrative studies is the world of digital media (hyper-link texts or narratives). Courtney Hopf (2010), for instance, analyses forms of narrative mass-collaboration on internet platforms (such as web serials on YouTube) and therefore introduces the theoretical term ‘story network’:

54 Interestingly, this rhizomatically inspired criticism of time as a “neutralised set of coordinates” finds an echo in blending-theoretical approaches to narrative. The main concern of Dancygier (2012a), for instance, is to shift the focus from time as pure sequentiality to the experience of time by characters, i.e. to the way temporal coordinates signify in terms of causality and memory. She suggests “that causation and motives, rather than sequentiality, are the primary ‘glue’ holding the story together” (Dancygier 2012a, 49). While Dancygier thus downgrades the importance of temporality as such and upgrades the importance of experiential connections, Koschorke (2012), by contrast, suggests that it is the tension between the two, i.e. “the not entirely determined zone between the[se] modalities of concatenation” that is “the elixir of narration” (Koschorke 2012, 75, his emphasis). In his view, “[l]oose concatenations [between events or “nodes in the surface structure”, ESW] that oscillate between temporal contiguity and causal relatedness invite the recipient to [perform] a subsequent co-authorship; he gets motivated to enrich the story, to provide the story, tentatively, with supplementary plot causality and to strengthen thereby its coherence” (Koschorke 2012, 76). Koschorke’s take presents thus a performative rather than representationalist approach to a narrativity, which he considers to come into being through the reader’s interaction with the text.

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I derive the concept of the ‘story network’ by hybridizing the functions performed by social networks and storyworlds, two terms that have entered common parlance in recent years. [. . .] ‘Storyworlds’ [. . .] furnish networks with the narrativizing process in which members of a social network participate. [. . .] ‘Story networks’ [. . .] are storyworlds that are built with the cooperation and collaboration of large numbers of users or participants, and the process piggybacks on the social networks people form, allowing them to jointly imagine a world and a narrative. We might also call them the narrative arm of ‘remix culture,’ as described by theorist Lawrence Lessig, in which the so-called ‘consumers’ of a story are actively involved as creators, and the initial creators see this as vital to the process [. . .]. (Hopf 2010, paragraph 4)

Such ‘story networks’ blur the boundaries of the real and the fictive (and thus ontological-narratological hierarchies like that between the diegetic and the extradiegetic world): video messages seem initially to be posted by real persons, but are then revealed to be performances by actors that introduce fictive beings into the same world of digital representations that is also inhabited by real (nonfictive) people. Thus, “the users are invested in these narratives as something more than stories that take place somewhere else, inside a television set, on a computer screen, printed on a page. The world of these stories is their own world, and it is both virtual and real, physical and imagined” (Hopf 2010, paragraph 34). This is surely a perfect illustration of Deleuze’s claim that the book (here rather: the fictional world) does not represent the world (ontological hierarchy), but forms a rhizome with the world (ontological heterarchy). Story networks live by ‘lines of flight’ that transversally cut across semiotic boundaries, hierarchies and oppositions. What is more, ‘story networks’ require, as Hopf points out, the transformation of the classical, unidirectional model of literary communication (according to which a message is transmitted from a sender to a receiver) into a network model that includes feedback-loops of creation. She emphasises that “‘readers’ influence narrative creation as much as ‘authors’” (Hopf 2010, paragraph 12). Regrettably, Hopf does not make the specifically Deleuzian, ‘rhizomatic’ quality of her analysis of ‘story networks’ explicit, but given that her article is published in a journal entitled Rhizomes, the connection to Deleuzian thinking is quite obvious. Maria Tamboukou (2010) analyses the letters and paintings of Gwen John – “an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century” (67) – and uses Deleuze’s rhizome in order to show how John’s creative work undermines norms of narrative coherence – and that in many respects. Like Gibson, she points to Deleuze’s temporal notion of “aion” in order to explain to what extent “John is not reductible to the content of her letters [. . .] [;] they cannot establish any causal relationship between what she does, why she does what she does and who she is” (Tamboukou 2010, 75). She argues that John’s letters are “events” (in a Deleuzian sense; see also Gibson 1996, 179–184) and as such placed “outside the temporal causation of Chronos”

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(John’s letters as “assemblages of forces and affects”, Tamboukou 2010, 75). Although her article aims primarily at analysing Gwen John’s artistic creations, Tamboukou’s approach is also interesting on a theoretical level, since she draws on various norms of narrative coherence (thematic unity, characters, their roles or identities, the explicit versus the implicit) and shows how John’s letters challenge these norms by means of their performative dynamics. Her letters hold differences together, not as oppositions but as multiplicities: despair – and – hope, woman – and – artist, inside – and – outside, solitude – and – communication. As Deleuze has noted, ‘even if there are only two terms [woman and artist], there is an AND between the two, which neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes multiplicity’ [. . .]. In this sense, dualisms can be dispersed working in the intermezzo between the two terms: what is happening in the middle, becomings between being a woman and an artist, lines of flight between despair and hope, deterritorializations between inside and outside, connections between solitude and communication. This is where I have worked with John’s letters and paintings: in the intermezzo of narrative sequences, in the gaps and interstices between broken narrative lines, in milieus where the event emerges. (Tamboukou 2010, 78)

More recently, Loots, Coppens and Sermijn (2013) published an article (“Practising a rhizomatic perspective in narrative research”), which complies with Tamboukou’s approach in that it also examines the relationship between norms of coherence and subjectivity, but from a sociological perspective. The authors challenge the “conceptualization of the subject as an internalized and evolving story that integrates past, present and future experiences, actions and thoughts in a meaningful whole”, which “fits the traditional western discourse of a subject as a coherent and contingent organized essential self” (Loots, Coppens and Sermijn 2013, 109). They prefer conceptualising narrative selfhood in a decentralised manner according to which the self is constituted by a variety of “I-positions”, of inner voices that create a “dialogical self” (109). Their approach undermines norms of coherence inasmuch as the authors conceive of selfhood as a rhizomatic story with multiple entryways according to which [. . .] every entry will lead to other connections, and different versions of selfhood in which the one is not more ‘true’ than the other. Which entryway is taken and which connections there are made during the speaking, depends on the context in which the telling takes place. This is so because, in the telling, there is always the other. The other may be a concrete other person, but also the societal language and discourse which an individual makes use of during speaking. (Loots, Coppens and Sermijn 2013, 111–112)

As we see here, the authors take into account that the individual is always embedded in and influenced by its environment. This complies not only with the idea of ‘irreducible perspectivity’ and systemic thinking, but also with the contention that codes of different regimes and levels interact in the formation of narrative

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orders (see Figure 1). The authors highlight especially the role of the interviewer, defending the position that the narrative researcher “does not collect narratives, but instead jointly participates in their construction” (110). Accordingly, [t]he other becomes part of the rhizome and determines the possibilities and limitations in which a story can be construed. The image of the individual with a core self is replaced within the narrative, rhizomatic thinking by the image of a multiple, multifaceted individual who shapes and reshapes him/herself within specific contexts and who is open for the continuous inclusion of change. From a human need for stability and order [‘homo ordinans’, see above, ESW], people continuously create different kinds of connections between story elements throughout their speaking. (Loots, Coppens and Sermijn 2013, 112)

The authors illustrate their theoretical reflections by a detailed analysis of interviews with parents of abducted children in Uganda, identifying concretely a polyphony of different inner “voices” (e.g., voices of suffering, of no control, of fighting back) that express themselves during the interviews with a mother and open “a window into her multi-layered and dynamically organized inner world” (Loots, Coppens and Sermijn 2013, 116). Moreover, the authors offer a differentiation between the mother’s inner voices and “audience voices”, i.e. “social-cultural voices” that “became part of Ellen’s narrative performance” (see 118–119). To summarise, one can say that the authors’ rhizomatic approach highlights the dynamic, contextual, performative and multifarious dimensions of storytelling, thereby conceptualising selfhood via multifaceted narrative negotiations rather than via the coherence of a finished story. Rhizomatic negotiations are also at the core of Koschorke’s (2012) narrative theory. His approach has a broader, cultural scope than the present study, but its epistemic orientation and basic assumptions are completely consistant with mine. According to Koschorke, narratives negiotiate between truth and fiction, oscillate between representation and performance and mediate between different codes and semiotic regimes; they create orders and simultaneously serve processes of semiotic disintegration and fluidisation. Narratives are like the glue that holds culture and society together by serving simultaneously all their contradictory needs. Koschorke mentions the rhizome explicitly only twice, but his ideas as well as his vocabulary suggest that his understanding of the role that narratives play, from a cultural-semiotic perspective, in society complies with many dimensions of the rhizome. He draws primarily on Lotman’s (2001) cultural-semiotic theory, according to which sign systems of every size can be understood as hierarchically embedded or as contiguous cultural spheres. Lotman analyses the complex interplay of processes of semiotic translations, of the creation of semiotic spheres, of boundaries and of the transgression of boundaries. Using this theoretical background, Koschorke examines processes of narrative creation (and decline) as well as the cultural-semiotic function of

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narratives. He is concerned with stories in different domains and on different levels of society, from the most little and futile narrated episodes in everyday communication to master narratives that lay the foundations of a culture (see Koschorke 2012, 397). Considering society as a highly heterogenous entity where many codes and semiotic regimes are clashing, he sees the advantage (and thus the function) of narratives in their ability to come to terms with this irreducible cultural-semiotic multiplicity. I would even say that, according to Koschorke, it is the rhizomatic qualities of narratives that provide them with their cultural value. Consequently, the ways of coping with cultural-semiotic multiplicity are as multidimensional as the rhizome itself. The first time Koschorke draws explicitly on the rhizome is in the context of his considerations on cultural fields, more precisely on systems of categories. Koschorke argues that terms (“Begriffe”) do not function according to rules of induction or deduction, but that they are “categories that gather heterogenous and polymorphous composites, the latter being related to practices, positions of narrators, interests, pasts, [and] bifurcations of meanings of every kind” (Koschorke 2012, 184, here and hereafter translation mine). According to Koschorke, cultural fields are never governed by a single system of categories. Nonetheless, there is a need for consistency, i.e. for categorical homogeneity. Correspondingly, societies need a means to live with their inconsistencies and inner contradictions. The solution for this problem lies in setting boundaries, i.e. in what Deleuze calls an “asignifying rupture”: “If everything seems to be rhizomatically connected to everything” – which is the source of the irreducible inconsistency or chaos within culture and society – “[then] the creation of order procedes but by the negative operation of interrupting semiotic interdependency” (Koschorke 2012, 186, translation mine). The second explicit mention of the rhizome occurs in his chapter on “epistemic narratives”. Here, again, Koschorke reflects upon the lack of a metacode, the innercultural clash and superposition of semiotic regimes, which cannot be translated into each other. The same problem concerns generalisations as well (i.e. the creation of abstract, synthesising terms or categories), since every generalisation and every synthesis (i.e. every higher-level order) relies on a precedent order (or, in my terms, on an “irreducible perspectivity”, see Figure 1), hich governs the process of abstraction. Koschorke’s point is that these different orders, which create disorder through their coexistence, are interwoven with each other, despite their inconsistency and irreducible plurality. They are “rhizomatically interconnected, and often this semiotic texture achieves a high degree of density in the zone in which ‘systems of communication’ (Wittgenstein) are engaged in a hegemonial competition on their interpretative power” (Koschorke 2012, 370, translation and emphasis mine).

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The rhizomatic picture of a “texture”, “tissue” (“Gewebe”), network, rootstock or the like appears repeatedly throughout the whole book, referring generally to the constitution of semiotic systems (including narrative systems). For instance, Koschorke maintains that “the connective tissue of narratives grows through all linguistic levels” (2012, 83–84); he conceives of a language area as being constituted by “a dense texture of great and little, of fix and fluid terms [anchored] in their respective semantic networks” (171); moreover, he claims that there is a halo of narrative elements that surrounds terms and their definitional core, maintaining that “narrative elements provide the terms with a historical trace and entrenches them like a widespread rootstock in the collective experience” (275). With regard to the interplay between the text and its references to the extratextual reality, Koschorke conceives of inference as a “texture of internal relations within a semiotic world” (334). In his conclusion, which provides a dense and concise summary of his approach, he also uses the idea of texture. Referring to little, everyday narratives, he explains: Wo sich deren Gewebe [von “kleinen Geschichten und flüchtigen episodischen Evidenzen”, ESW] verdichtet und über die Bewältigung von einzelnen Situationen hinaus feste Regelmäßigkeiten annimmt, prägen sich Organisationsweisen von Raum und Zeit aus, die dem gesellschaftlichen Imaginären Form geben. Das Erzählen ist an solchen Formgebungen beteiligt, und stellt zugleich ein Medium unendlicher Transformation, ja auch des Hinüberspielens ins Polymorphe und Formlose dar. Es schafft gleitende Übergänge zwischen Fiktion und Realität [. ..] In seiner Mittlerrolle ist es einerseits an der Stabilisierung der gesellschaftlichen Zeichenordnung beteiligt und trägt andererseits dazu bei, diese Ordnung in einem Zustand beweglicher Unfertigkeit zu halten. Während strikt begriffliche Ableitungen und Systemlogiken starr sind und nur in sozial ausgelagerten Sondersprachen zur Perfektion gebracht werden können, lassen sich Inkonsistenz, Mehrfachcodierung, Unbestimmtheit als kultursemiotische Fundamentalgegebenheiten mit erzählerischen Mitteln plastisch gestalten. [. . .] Aufs Ganze gesehen bleiben Kulturen sich selbst opak. Sie träumen und dichten sich eher, als dass sie sich denken. Auf dieser Stufe wird unentscheidbar, was Wahrheit und was Erfindung ist. (Koschorke 2012, 397–398)55

55 “Where their texture [of “small stories and fleeting episodic evidences”, ESW] becomes denser and achieves a fortified regularity beyond singular situations, forms of the organisation of space and time emerge that shape the imaginary of society. Storytelling partakes in such shapings and simultaneously serves as a medium of infinite transformation, even of transition into the polymorphous and amorphous. It creates gliding transitions between fiction and reality. As an instance of mediation, it contributes, on the one hand, to the stabilisation of the semiotic order of society, on the other hand, it helps maintaining this order in a state of flexible disclosure. While strictly terminological deductions and systemic logics are stiff and can be brought to perfection only in socially disintegrated, specialised languages, inconsistency, code multiplicity and indetermination, which constitute cultural-semiotic basics, may be given a flexible shape by narrative means. Considered as a whole, cultures remain opaque to

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It is, first and foremost, the dialectics between flexible or fluid semiotic processes (semiotic “activation”, see Koschorke 2012, 220) and their hardening into categories, binarisms or persistent stories, i.e. into fixed orders (“sedimentation”, see 220) that the rhizome, Koschorke’s and my theory have in common.56 This dialectics underlies Deleuze’s distinction between the tree and the rhizome and Koschorke’s definition of narrative both as a “provisory semiotic action” and as a stabilised order, which comes into being “through [the] iteration, schematisation and conventionalisation” of the former (see Koschorke 2012, 109). This is why culture, according to Koschorke, should not be understood as an order, but as a text with multiple levels where heteronomous processes take place and where systemic rationalities are constructed and deconstructed (see 371). A textual structure, in this connection, has to be understood as “a matrix that dialectically fluidises and stabilises, dynamises and schematises itself, and that also gives space to those irregular, eminently situation-dependent relations that develop in the zone of negotiations between different rationalities” (371). Interestingly, Koschorke (2012, 370) drops the term of “double conditionality” (“Doppelkonditionierung”) in order to describe the clash of irreconcilable codes or rationalities; it draws on “the superimposition of two coordinate systems” hich, are not consistent or congruent and ch “both chart in their own ways the whole field, albeit the maps cannot be consistently mapped upon each other” (Koschorke 2012, 370). This train of thought mirrors two basic characteristics of the rhizome. On the one hand, the arborescent and the rhizomatic modes distinguished by Deleuze exemplify such a ‘double conditionality’; on the other, Koschorke’s idea draws, even terminologically, on the rhizomatic “map” and principle of cartography according to which “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12; see also Koschorke 2012, 352). The metaphor of texture and the ideas of a dialectics of fludisation and sedimentation and of ‘double conditionality’ and cartography can be considered the most crucial commonalities between Koschorke’s theory and Deleuze’s rhizome. But there are five further remarkable overlaps between their approaches. Firstly, Koschorke draws heavily on the Deleuzian idea of ‘betweenness’ and oscillation, for instance with regard to the “zone between” the two conditionalities (see

themselves. They dream and poetically invent themselves rather than thinking themselves. What is truth and what is fiction becomes, on that level, undecidable”. 56 In my pyramidal model of narrativity (see section 2.6), this dialectics corresponds primarily to the distinction between narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity; it is also inherent in the circular and transversal rhizomatic dynamics that provide the Pyramid (as a fixed order) with fluidity (see esp. section 2.6.4).

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Koschorke 2012, 371), but also with regard to narrative “motivation” (see 75–76) or “semantic potentiality” (see 86–87). Secondly, the two approaches reject the idea of representation in the sense of a 1:1 congruence of form and meaning57 and highlight instead (thirdly) the performative dimension of semiotic processes.58 Fourthly, they question the validity of binarisms (see Koschorke 2012, Chapter VI.2, especially 351–352); Koschorke opposes the model of ‘epistemic fields’ to conceptual binarisms (see Koschorke 2012, 367), seeing (like Deleuze) an intrinsic connection between binarisms (or “differential semantics”) and power (see Koschorke 2012, 239–240). Finally, Koschorke and Deleuze offer a view that challenges (or deconstructs) the logic of hierarchies (see Koschorke 2012, 177–186). Another theory, which has significant overlaps with my Deleuzian approach, but which simultaneously differs from mine in fundamental ways, is Askin’s (2015; 2016) Deleuzian “differential theory of narrative”. Askin’s narratological approach is anchored in philosophy, more precisely, in a metaphysical criticism of Kant’s anti-metaphysical philosophy, especially of the primacy of the human mind in Kant’s conception of the transcendental (the transcendental referring to what enables, restricts or conditions human experience and understanding). As Askin criticises, “in Kant, everything plays out within the human mind” (2016, 8). In Kant’s philosophy, no ontic reality, no thing-in-itself (the “noumenon”) can ever be directly experienced nor reached by human knowledge, since the human mind mediates all reality. Askin reproaches Kant with anthropocentrism (see 2015, 157), “correlationism”,59 a “circular, subjectivist conception of the transcendental” (2015, 156)60 and with a “transcendent” conception of the subject, consciousness and the transcendental (see Askin 2015, 157); Kant is argued to create both a gap and a hierarchical relation between the empirical and the transcendental in that he puts the human mind, as the place of the transcendental, first, ranking it ontologically and epistemologically over the empirical. In Askin’s eyes, Deleuze’s philosophy is susceptible of remedying Kant’s faults to the extent that Deleuze

57 “As it is well known, culturally high-ranked texts allow an almost infinite plurality of interpretations” (Koschorke 2012, 82). 58 “An act of signifying intervenes in the world that it seems to mirror and, in a way, it is but this act that gives birth to it via a creative processes of appropriation” (Koschorke 2012, 22). 59 According to correlationism, Kant’s argumentation turns ontic things, which have a mindindependent reality, into “the correlate of consciousness”, i.e. into a mental concept, thus deontologising them. See Askin (2015, 156). 60 Askin describes this circularity in terms of Deleuze’s criticism of Kant. He explains that “[t]he Kantian relation between the empirical and the transcendental is [. . .] one of resemblance. This resemblance effectively establishes the primacy of the empirical since the empirical is thus transplanted into the heart of the transcendental, precisely the realm which is supposed to account for the very conditions of the empirical” (Askin 2015, 156).

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“proposes a truly metaphysical transcendental operating outside the human mind” (Askin 2016, 15, orig. emphasis). Deleuzian philosophy conceives of the transcendental in ontic, non-anthropomorphic terms; it also defends a “flat and anarchic ontology” (2015, 157), which, instead of privileging subjectivity, puts the transcendental and the empirical onto the same “plane of immanence”. Moreover, Deleuze models the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical not in terms of resemblance and representation, but in generative terms inasmuch as the transcendental is considered to bring about the empirical; in other words, the transcendental is “ontogenetic and morphogenetic” (2015, 157). According to Askin, this philosophical debate is relevant for narrative theory, provided that narratology conceives of narrative “as Kantian mind-dependent, ideal representation” (Askin 2015, 158): Narrative frameworks, and especially approaches from cognitivist narratology, “cast narrative precisely as representational and experiential with no purchase on any mind-independent reality whatsoever” (Askin 2015, 155), while “it [narrative, ESW] should be conceived of as mindindependent, expressive reality” (157). Indeed, Askin argues that “narrative is fundamentally unconscious and non-human” (156, orig. emphasis), that is, “a mind-independent reality on its own terms” (156). Askin’s theory is based on four interconnected key concepts of Deleuzian philosophy (namely the virtual, the actual, intensity and expression) as well as on Deleuze’s ideas of difference and becoming; he uses these notions in order to develop his “differential” model of narrative, which lives by a dynamics of transition between virtual and actual narratives. According to Deleuze’s flat ontology, the real is constituted by both the transcendental (called the virtual) and by the empirical (called the actual). While both realms can be terminologically distinguished from each other, their philosophical and terminological distinction does not imply an ontological separation: “the virtual produces the actual without ever existing apart from it” (2016, 22). Askin applies this Deleuzian ontology to the “ontological build-up and status of narrative”; he assumes the existence of “virtual Narrative” (also called “the multiplicity” [Askin 2015, 159] or “the virtual Idea of Narrative” [Askin 2015, 158]), which he understands as a “virtual unground” of narrative – an “abyssal swarming of differential [narrative] elements and their relations” (2016, 23). Virtual Narrative “erupts into the actual by way of the intensive” (Askin 2015, 159), producing concrete, manifest, “numerically differentiable narratives”, which “implicate” virtual Narrative (Askin 2015, 158). Virtuality and actuality are considered to be highly interdependent, ontologically immanent entities, which engage in processes of mutual transformation. “While out of the depths of ontogenetic becoming actual narratives are drawn, speculative becoming denotes the movement by which actual narratives dive back into these depths” (Askin 2015, 160). Askin denotes the transition from virtual to actual narrative as “narrative intensity” and the

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entire compound of narrative becoming (including virtual and actual narratives as well as the intense transition between them, which takes place at their thresholds) as “the expressivist concept of narrative” (see Askin 2015, 159).61 Askin undergirds his claims by the analysis of actual literary narratives (see 2015, 160–167). He argues that the narratives that he analyses stage an “antiKantian performance” by “speculatively unveil[ing] their very own virtual conditions” (2015, 156). Askin’s analysis amounts to illuminating the meta-narrative dimension of narratives, which manifests itself, in the literary narratives under consideration, for instance in the narrative questioning of “the threshold between subjective representation and personal experience on the one side and objective expressivity and impersonal becoming on on the other” (2015, 161) or in “the eventness [ . . . . ], at the expense of actants performing acts – something happens, not someone does something” (2015, 162). In his view, narratives do not aim, as Fludernik argues,62 at the representation of consciousness (i.e., of feelings, experiences or actions), but at the “expression [in Deleuze’s sense, ESW] of the antecedent virtual realm of forces and sensations” (Askin 2015, 163). The narrative “expression” of this non-human ontic dimension provides narrative, in Askin’s theory, with its “non-human” ontic status. Moreover, insofar as the non-human “realm of forces and sensations”, expressed by narratives, is the virtual condition of all kinds of narration, narratives are considered to thematise, meta-narratively,63 their own conditions of existence, i.e. their own virtuality. As Askin puts it, “an adequate concept of narrative has to be conceived as [an] immanent topological fold between actual narratives and the virtual Idea of Narrative” (Askin 2015, 164). While I will point more concretely to overlaps and differences between Askin’s and my approach in chapter 2, I would like to highlight shortly the most important similarities and differences between our two Deleuzian approaches. Perhaps the most important overlap between our approaches, which is due to our subscription to “the three pillars on which Deleuze’s system rests: difference (heterogeneity), immanence (topological folding of virtual and actual), and univocity (one realm, one voice)” (Askin 2015, 160–161) is our refusal to establish, as Askin puts it, a “definitive list of differential [narrative] elements and relations”, because

61 “The virtual is transformed into the actual by passing through the gateway of the intensive. This transformation is exactly what the term expression denotes” (Askin 2015, 159). 62 Askin emphasises himself that his approach is opposed to Fludernik’s (see Askin 2015, 168, note 2). 63 Concerning Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Askin (2015, 166) notes, for instance, that “the story’s very first description of the titular wallpaper suggests that it be read as a metanarrative comment rather than just as ‘captur[ing] the mind of the narrator or antipat[ing] her lunacy’ as Fludernik has it”.

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“this would turn the virtual into into the realm of transcendent identity rather than transcendental difference, a realm populated by abstract universals severed from their particulars, instead of Deleuzian concrete universals productive of actuality” (Askin 2015, 167). In other words, it is and necessarily “remains unclear what exactly th[e] differential elements and relations of Narrative are” (Askin 2015, 167, orig. emphasis), since “the virtual Idea of Narrative has to be unearthed always anew, always speculatively working back from any given actual narrative towards its concrete virtual conditions” (Askin 2015, 167). Narrativity, understood as an abstract universal feature, and narrativity, understood as a concrete, highly variable quality of distinct narratives, exist on the same plane of “immanence”. Narratives are “universals in constant variation” (Askin 2015, 167). I submit to these claims insofar as both of us thus try to think univocity and multiplicity, universality and variation together. Moreover, both of us do so by claiming an interplay of (or, more precisely, the existence of a feedback loop between) virtuality and actuality: in our theories, there is both a “processual actualization of virtuality” (Askin 2015, 157) and “a second kind of becoming [. . .] which goes back from the actual to the virtual” (2015, 160; see section 2.4). As a result, we also share the view that the “ground” of narrativity is simultaneously, as Askin puts it, an “unground, an incessant ungrounding” (2015, 159), insofar as narrativity lives by such feedback loops and by “different/ciation” (2015, 168, note 6; see also 2016, 23). Both of our theories criticise the definition of narrative or narrativity in terms of representation and focus instead on the “performance” (2015, 156) of narratives (or, as I put it in chapter 2, the performative dimension of narrativity). Finally, this performative dimension is connected somehow, in both of our approaches, to various kinds of what Askin calls “incoherence” (see 2015, 159, 160,161, 163, 164), also termed “disfiguration” (2015, 162, 164) or “disintegration” (2016, 166) – textual phenomena that both of us consider to contradict Ricœur’s claim of narrative “configuration” (see chapter 2). These overlaps between our approaches are significant (and astonishing), but nonetheless accompanied by crucial discrepancies. First of all, my model is not built on a metaphysical position and/or criticism of Kant; since I am not a philosopher, I also prefer to leave such fundamental discussions to experts, restricting myself to narratology proper. However, a fundamental difference, which very probably results from the different (philosophical versus properly narratological) backgrounds of our approaches, emerges from the “non-human” and decidedly anti-cognitivist design of Askin’s theory. Askin criticises that “narrative is taken to be fundamentally grounded in human experience and consciousness dealing in mental representations only”, considering Herman’s claim of a “nexus of narrative and mind” as “troublesome and unsatisfactory” (2015, 156). He claims that “while a concept of narrative is necessarily mind-dependent, narrative in-itself is

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not” (2015, 156). I do not agree with this claim at all, simply because narratives are semiotic objects that are both created (narrated, written, etc.) and received (read and processed) by humans, i.e. by (embodied) human minds. That there is a “nexus of narrative and mind” (see Herman 2002, 137; Askin 2015, 156) is thus more than obvious to me. I wonder whether Askin’s claims are based on a misunderstanding. Does he think that cognitive narratology assumes that all narratives seek to showcase mental representations, i.e. the way we think? If so, this would be a severe misunderstanding. Cognitive narratology is interested in all kinds of interplay between narrative forms or features and cognitive processes, results or experiences; it does not restrict the thematic or performative scope of narratives in any way. While some narratives may have the goal of representing subjective experiences of the world, as they are filtered through the human mind, other narratives may very well seek to grasp the non-human world of the transcendental or reflect, meta-narratively, on the possibility of narrating the “threshold between subjective representation [. . .] and [. . .] impersonal becoming” (Askin 2015, 161). Nonetheless, it would be wrong, from my point of view, to conclude from this very fact that narrative itself is non-human and “extra-mental” (2015, 156). I agree with the assumption that the point of narratives lies, in many cases, not in the representation of contents, but in the performance of contents (see especially my analysis of Kafka’s Schloss, chapter 5), but I conceive of this performance not as a manifestation of the non-human, but as a specific kind of text-reader interaction according to which a textual arrangement provokes in readers, during reading, certain cognitive-emotive activities that trigger specific experiences (e.g. of fear, discomfort, boredness or language scepticism) instead of simply encoding (i.e. representing or telling about) them. The clash with a noumenal world-in-itself can count among these experiences, perhaps even in the passage recounting the car accident in The Echo Maker, as analysed by Askin (2015, 161). But this reader experience of the world-in-itself, enabled by the stylistic shattering of “representational and experiential coherence” (Askin 2015, 161), is still a human experience; it is triggered by human language and experienced as a result of human linguistic processing and imagination. In such cases, the text-reader interaction becomes a performance by which readers come into contact with the non-human dimension of the transcendental world in which we are embedded.64 Every confrontation

64 Askin grounds his conception of non-human narrative, in this context, in the Deleuzian notions of “[a]ffects and percepts as objective beings of sensation [which] register as affections and perceptions only once they have become subjective: my pain, this river, I panic” (Askin 2015, 162, orig. emphasis). This is a point where I follow neither Deleuze’s philosophy nor its narratological application by Askin (2015).

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with “the Other” (be it the non-human, the non-living [i.e., death] or whatever is excluded from the respective semiotic sphere) is a fundamental human experience and concern. In a nutshell, unlike Askin’s theory, my approach is thus decidedly cognitivist. It spends much attention and analytic effort to the analysis of the specific interplay between textual structures and its cognitive effects on readers. In this regard, my approach is hardly reconcilable with Askin’s claims. Two further differences between Askin’s and my approach leap into the eye if one compares his theory with the model that I present in the following chapter. Firstly, while Askin’s theory is built on a two-fold dialectics between the virtual and the actual, I am offering a more refined, four-fold dialectics (see section 2.4). Askin’s narrative actuality appears there under a more differentiated form, comprising a dynamic stage of narrativity in actualisation and a stable stage of resultative narrativity; Askin’s narrative virtuality, for its part, is split in my model into two theoretical areas as well, one being constituted by an anthropological (un)ground, the other by virtual narrativity proper, the latter comprising, in my approach, also the cognitive-affective system of the reader.65 My study thus shares Askin’s concern to include the transcendental (Deleuze’s virtual) into the conception of narrative; but while this transcendental or virtual remains, in Askin’s model, sort of a black box, whose theorisation is restricted to the very claim that the virtual generates and conditions actual narratives, my model strives toward depicting more concretely the relationship between virtual and actual dimensions. Secondly, my model makes an effort to theorise the role that coherence (or, more precisely, that the cognition of readers aiming at the creation of coherence) plays for narrativity. My theory therefore seeks to bridge the gap that yawns – already on the linguistic level – between coherence and incoherence, exploring the space between the two extremes. While Askin’s theory seems to intuit the important role that impaired coherence plays for a theory of narrative or narrativity, he concentrates primarily on the side of “incoherence”; my focus, by contrast, lies on the processes that fill the gap between coherence and incoherence. I appreciate his notion of narrative “intensity”, considered as the “gateway” or “threshold between actuality and virtuality” (Askin 2015, 159), inasmuch as it highlights this processual component of narrativity. Nonetheless, I would not use these liminal metaphors, because I consider the processes that connect the realm of narrative virtuality with actualised narrative results to represent the very core of 65 One has to distinguish, in my pyramidal model of narrativity, between the actual and virtual dimensions that constitute the levels of the Pyramid, on the one hand, and the hybrid (both virtual and actual) status of the Pyramid itself (as a model). I elaborate on this distinction in section 2.4.1.

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(performative) narrativity – a vast space of multiple and specific interactions, which readers sometimes never accomplish to leave in favour of a completely actualised result. The similarities and differences between Askin’s and my approach will (hopefully) emerge more clearly in the following chapter, which presents a review on previous research on narrativity. It explores basic problems of defining narrativity and attempts to systematise both the notion and the debate, notably by presenting a proper, pyramidal model of narrativity. The considerations on the relationship between chaos and order, proposed in the present chapter, present an important epistemic background for chapter 2 insofar as it builds on previous uses of the rhizome (and of Deleuzian philosophy) in literary and narrative theory and further exploits the rhizome’s potential for coming to terms with basic epistemological problems, linked to the interdependence of narrativity and narratology, semiotic circularity and the intricacies of narrative and narratological representations and orders.

2 Problems of Defining Narrativity: Research Review and Systematisation 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.3.4 2.3.5 2.3.6 2.3.7 2.3.8 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 2.4.3 2.4.4 2.4.5 2.4.6 2.4.7 2.4.8 2.4.9 2.4.10 2.4.11 2.5 2.5.1 2.5.2

The Babylonian Tower of definitions 70 The S/U problem: Specificity versus universality 95 Inner boundaries of narrativity and narratology: Rivalling dimensions 100 Story versus discourse 100 Mimesis and antimimesis 109 Text versus reader 116 Dynamics versus schemata 123 Static versus dynamic coherence 137 Representationalist versus performative narrativity 151 The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic 163 Conclusions 172 A new proposal for systematisation: The Pyramid of narrativity 174 Goals and basics of my integrative model 174 Three stages of narrativity and its terminological origins 180 The vertical axis of temporal processing 183 Pyramidal dynamics and the circulatory design 185 Virtual narrativity and the principle of zoomability 190 Narrativity in actualisation 193 Resultative narrativity 195 The phenomenal summit of narrativity: Meaning 198 The anthropological (un)ground of narrativity: Narrative conventions, practices, traditions 206 The vain search for narrativity’s wellspring, or: Narrativity’s dialectic nature 210 Contexts: Outer boundaries as spheres of semiotic exchange 214 Limits and blind spots of the pyramidal model 219 Theoretical orientation: The sides of production and reception 219 Epistemological orientation: Definition versus rhizome 221

2.1 The Babylonian Tower of definitions Die Pointe des ‘linguistic turn’ [. . .] liegt [. . .] in seinem aktivischen Verständnis von Bezeichnungsvorgängen: Das Bezeichnen interveniert in die Welt, die es scheinbar nur widerspiegelt, und lässt sie in einem kreativen Aneignungsprozess in gewisser Weise überhaupt erst entstehen. So bildet nicht nur das Zeichen den zu bezeichnenden Sachverhalt nach, sondern auch umgekehrt gestaltet sich das Bezeichnete entsprechend der ordnenden (Koschorke 2012, 22) Kraft der verwendeten Zeichen.1

1 “The punchline of the ‘linguistic turn’ consists of acknowledging the active dimension of processes of representation: representing something means to intervene in the world that only https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-003

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It is not unusual for scholars to start their theoretical considerations of narrativity by criticising one of the definitions of narrativity with which they disagree. It is equally common for scholars to begin with the presentation of a strong, more or less provocative claim on what narrativity “really” means. I have chosen a different approach for three reasons. Firstly, I have rarely read a definition that in my eyes would have been absolutely wrong (even though, from my point of view, most of them are still far from being right in the sense of being complete). Secondly, I am – I admit it freely – not able to explain in one sentence what narrativity is (if so, this work would not be so voluminous), precisely because, in my understanding, literary narrativity is a very complex dynamic field representing a rhizomatic network of different parameters and dimensions rather than a phenomenon that can be paraphrased in a single sentence.2 Accordingly, all I can do in order to explain narrativity is to explore the connections, nodes, strata and movements of and within this network, in an attempt to show the broad range of possibilities that it offers. Thirdly, the discussion on narrativity has reached a stage at which a definition in medias res (such as: “Narrativity is the representation of a change of state experienced by at least one anthropomorphic existent who is situated in a storyworld.”) cannot but distort the notion of narrativity insofar as the latter has by now a history (that is, a diachronic dimension), created by the long succession of narratology’s preoccupations with “narrative” structures, qualities or dynamics.3 The following short excerpts provide exemplarily an (albeit very limited) insight into the conceptual chaos that is produced by successive approaches to narrative and narrativity.

seems to be mirrored, but that is actually brought into existence, in a way, by a creative process of signifying appropriation. Accordingly, not only does the sign imitate the signified state of affairs, but the state of affairs is conversely modelled on the structural impetus provided by the signs that are used to describe it” (translation mine). 2 A related idea has been presented by Ochs and Capps who “believe that narrative as genre and activity can be fruitfully examined in terms of a set of dimensions that a narrative displays to different degrees and in different ways. Rather than identifying a set of distinctive features that always characterize narrative, we stipulate dimensions that will always be relevant to a narrative, even if not elaborately manifest. [. . .] The dimensions pertain both to narrating as activity and to narrative as text. Each narrative dimension establishes a range of possibilities, which are realized in particular narrative performances” (Ochs and Capps 2001, 19, emphasis mine). This statement implies already implicitly Deleuze’s opposition between the virtual and the actual, which will play a role in my pyramidal of narrativity (see section 2.4). 3 See, for example, the analyses of the history of narratological research given by Darby (2001), Fludernik (1996), Herman (1999), McHale (2007), Ricœur (1985, 7–60), Nünning (2003), Nünning and Nünning (2002), Prince (2008a), Richardson (2000), Sommer (2004), Sternberg (2010), Alber and Fludernik (2010).

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What is interesting about these excerpts is not only the range of narrative dimensions that they put forward, but also the ways in which they partly overlap and partly contradict each other. Morphologically, a tale (skázka) may be termed any development proceeding from villainy (A) or a lack (a), through intermediary function to marriage (W*), or to other functions employed as a dénouement. (Propp 1968, 92, orig. emphasis) The minimal complete plot consists in the passage from one equilibrium to another. An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical. (Todorov 1977, 111) A plot is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us. (Lotman 1977, 234) The less probability that a given event will take place [. . .], the higher the rank of that event on the plot scale. (Lotman 1977, 236) [. . .] a plot can always be reduced to a basic episode – the crossing of the basic topological border in the plot’s spatial structure. (Lotman 1977, 238) The narrativity of a text depends on the extent to which that text fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholes, involving some sort of conflict, made up of discrete, specific and positive events, and meaningful in terms of a human project and a humanized universe. (Prince 1982, 160) It [a narrative, ESW] is at the same time affirmation of permanence and of the possibilities of change, affirmation of the necessary order and of the freedom which breaks or reestablishes that order. And yet these contradictions are not visible with the naked eye; on the contrary, the narrative gives the impression of equilibrium and neutralized contradictions. It is in this perspective that it appears essentially in its role of mediation. Of multiple mediations, one should say: mediations between structure and behavior, between permanence and history, between society and the individual. (Greimas 1983, 246) Plot was first defined, on the most formal level, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents [. . .]. This formal definition opens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plots so long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. [. . .] We may formulate the hypothesis that [. . .] metamorphoses of the plot consist of new instantiations of the formal principle of temporal configuration in hitherto unkown genres, types, and individual works. (Ricœur 1985, 8)

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[. . .] we can say that narrativity must be thought of as the enabling force of narrative, a force that is present at every point in the narrative and thus always operates syntagmatically. In my understanding, the term acquires value in so far as it can be applied to the linear existence of perceivable narrative texts of whatever kind. (Sturgess 1992, 28) It is not temporality per se that “makes” narrative; or if so, that temporality relates more to the reading process than to the context of the story. (Fludernik 1996, 21) I emphatically refuse to locate narrativity in the existence of a narrator [. . .]. (Fludernik 1996, 26) The unexpected, in oral narrative, not only constitutes the life blood of narrative, its tellability; it is structurally central to the shape of experience. (Fludernik 1996, 32) ‘Natural’ narratology, as I envisage it, relies on a definition of narrativity as mediated human experientiality (which can be plotted on the level of action or on the level of fictional consciousness). (Fludernik 1996, 36) Fictionality and narrativity largely overlap, but only if the fictional is not completely reduced to the traditional sense of the non-historical and a-referential. (Fludernik 1996, 42) I consider narrative [. . .] to be an acquired cognitive (macro-)frame or ‘schema’ which structures certain cultural practices. [. . .] It is in fact never a single narrateme that creates the idea of narrative but a plurality thereof. (Wolf 2003, 184) Representationality and experientiality are achieved by equipping the narrative world with basic constituents or content elements that are connected in specific ways. Both the content elements and their connections enable and condition narrative experientiality and constitute further important narratemes. (Wolf 2003, 186) [. . .] It seems to me that, in the context of narrativity, this “duality” of the actional and discursive planes [. . .] should never be forgotten or simply be put into brackets, since this would lead to an ignorance towards the meaning and function of the two structures which complete each other and interact with each other in order to produce a unique event: the narrative. (Baroni 2005, 51, translation mine)4 Surely, the beginning of wisdom, when dealing with narratives, is the recognition that there exist multiple narrativities, multiple forms, genres, and above all, conventions that

4 “Par conséquent, il me semble que, dans le contexte de la narrativité, cette ‘dualité’ des plans actionnels et discursifs, quelle que soit la manière dont on l’exprime [..], ne devrait jamais être oubliée, ou même simplement mise entre parenthèses, car cela conduirait à perdre de vue le sens et la fonction de l’une et de l’autre de ces structures, qui se complètent et interagissent pour produire un événement unique: le récit” (Baroni 2005, 51).

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pluralise the nature of the subject. [. . .] A theory of multiple narrativities is far more likely to produce more insights into more narratives than a theory that seeks to map out the concept as generalised universal. (Rudrum 2008, 264) A high degree of narrativity will be achieved when a narrative succeeds in performing a certain task or action, and a low degree of narrativity will typically be associated with a failure on performing that task. In both cases, the task/action performed is embedded in context, convention, and community. (Rudrum 2008, 271) The claim that narrative is a particular type of use is [. . .] defeated by the fact that narrative itself can be put to many different uses: telling a joke to entertain an audience; reporting current news; confessing one’s sins to a priest [. . .] [A]ll these communicative situations require a text that fulfils the abstract pattern constitutive of narrativity (= that which makes a text a narrative). [/] In summary: if narrative is a discourse that conveys a story, this is to say, a specific type of content, and if this discourse can be put to a variety of different uses, none of them constitutive of narrativity, then its definition should focus on story. As a mental representation, story is not tied to any particular medium, and it is independent of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. (Ryan 2007, 26) [. . .] stories can be analysed into four basic elements, some with sub-elements of their own. I characterize narrative as (i) a mode of representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling. This mode of representation (ii) focuses on a structured time-course of particularized events. In addition, the events represented are (iii) such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. The representation also (iv) conveys what it is like to live through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses undergoing the disruptive experience at issue. (Herman 2009a, 9) Far from located in the chronology, or chrono-logic, narrativity [. . .] requires chronological deformation and deficiency: whether temporary (i.e., ultimately rechronologized into event order) or permanent (left disordered to the end), whether mental (any doubtful “and then?” being enough for suspense in unforeknowing humans) or also textualized (into a late-before -early discourse, necessary to produce curiosity and surprise, in the face of accomplished but still undivulged facts). All three master effects/interests/subdynamics arise from discontinuities (gaps, hence multiple, ambiguous closures) between the telling/reading and the told sequence, yet each pursues its own gapping-to-gap-filling teleology in countless forms. (Sternberg 2010, 640)

Narrativity, as a concept, incorporates the various significations ascribed to it by divergent definitions, much like a literary work whose meaning expands as the number of divergent interpretations increases.5 Considered from this angle,

5 I am alluding to Lotman’s idea according to which “texts that preserve their cultural activity reveal a capacity to accumulate information, i.e. a capacity for memory. Nowadays Hamlet is

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Koschorke’s statement, quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, is not only susceptible of describing the relationship between the world and its narrative representations as a feedback loop according to which the world brings about stories and stories influence what we conceive of as the world. Inasmuch as Koschorke refers to all acts of representing something (“Das Bezeichnen”), the relationship of mutual influence pointed out by him can also be applied to narratological representations, e.g. to definitions of narrativity: they should represent a “felt [narrative] quality” (Abbott 2014, 588), which, as an object of research, exists independently from our theoretical reflections, but our definitions actually change our understanding of what we are in search of. To establish one’s own conception of narrativity means ordinarily to prove the countless preceding definitions wrong (or at least unsatisfying), to argue against them and to impose one’s own definition on former, allegedly inferior ones. By doing so, researchers participate, however, in a palimpsest-like practice where definitions become overwritten over and over again by new definitions, with (at least some of) the older ones still shining through. Considered from this angle, the history of the notion of narrativity can be metaphorically conceptualised as a “Babylonian” tower: each new, “better” definition is an additional building stone that makes the tower of narrativity grow higher and higher. But the higher the tower, the greater the “confusion of tongues”. In other words, the more we define and redefine the notion of narrativity, the more diversified it becomes, and the less we know what it actually denotes. This tower of definitions presents a serious challenge to researchers, since even the most ingenious new definitions of narrativity risk being nothing but a further building stone that heightens the Babylonian tower. Fortunately, narratology has become increasingly aware of this Babylonian6 problem. Recent accounts of narrativity do not simply add new layers to the tower of definitions, but make an effort to bring order into the chaos of rivalling concepts. Such attempts of systematisation can be considered to be a “metanar-

not just a play by Shakespeare, but it is also the memory of all its interpretations [ . . . .]. We may have forgotten what Shakespeare and his spectators knew, but we cannot forget what we have learnt since their time” (Lotman 2001, 18–19). 6 Indeed, what the metaphor of the Babylonian Tower does neglect is the chaotic dimension of narrativity, that is, the way definitions form a complex network of interrelations and of rhizomatic nodes of narrative dimensions. Instead, the metaphor highlights the historical, diachronic dimension of the notion of narrativity.

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ratological enterprise”.7 If narratology searches for “narrativity”, understood as an alleged narrative “essence”, thereby producing a diversity of “narrativities” (i.e., concepts of narrativity), one may call meta-narratological the research on the diversity of narrativities created by narratology (see Figure 2). Such a metanarratology can be said to produce (inter alia) meta-definitions of narrativity, which do not primarily aim at capturing “the” original narrative essence, but at systematising the countless narratological definitions, which aim at grasping “what makes narrative”. Although a meta-narratological systematisation of the diversity of approaches to narrativity is desperately needed, meta-definitions add indeed a new floor to the tower of narrativity, thereby aggravating the “confusion of tongues”: from now on, the word “narrativity” does not only refer, firstly, to an alleged generic essence, and, secondly, to rivalling narratological understandings of this genuine narrativity, but also, thirdly, to rivalling meta-narratological conceptions of this diversity of narratological understandings of the narrative essence. The length of the tail of attributes in the last sentence corresponds to the height of the tower of narrativity. The more we approach the top of the Tower, the further afar are we from the origin of meaning that we were initially in search of. Figure 2 illustrates this idea by blending the (hi)story of narratological research on narrativity with the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel: say the word “narrativity” today, and everybody understands something else. But if a new definition of narrativity cannot provide a solution, how can we counteract the confusion of tongues? On the one hand, we should stop the process of constantly piling new meta-orders in favour of a “flat ontology”, in Deleuze’s sense (see chapter 1). On the other hand, working with a flat ontology amounts to exploring and interconnecting the existing concepts, definitions and dimensions of narrativity. Such a rhizomatic proceeding has to be based on an examination of the tower itself, of its strata, dichotomies and basic building blocks. In order to achieve these goals, I will start by examining the top and the middle of the “tower of narrativities”, that is, meta-narratological definitions of narrativity and the diversification of first-level definitions.

7 I borrow this term from Herman: “[. . .] to foster the best practices in the field, narrative theorists should spotlight the analytic properties associated with various approaches, reflexively examining the presuppositions and entailments carried by different ways of framing questions about the phenomena under study. My hope is that the present response, along with my other contributions to the volume, can help lay groundwork for this metanarratological enterprise” (Herman et al. 2012, 232).

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Figure 2: The Babylonian Tower of definitions.

⁂ Taking into consideration the top of the “Babylonian Tower” of narrativity, I would like to draw shortly on three “meta-definitions” of narrativity. The goal of this section is not primarily to provide a detailed criticism of these definitions, but to compare the orders that their meta-definitions create. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Prince (2005) offers initially a twofold meta-definition of narrativity: Narrativity designates the quality of being narrative, the set of properties characterising narratives and distinguishing them from non-narratives [. . .]. It also designates the set of

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optional features8 that make narratives more prototypically narrative-like, more immediately identified, processed, and interpreted as narratives. (Prince 2005, 387)

Prince explains further that, according to the first acceptation of the term, narrativity is “a matter of kind (texts are narratives or they are not)” (Prince 2005, 387) – in narrative theory also called “narrativehood” (see Prince 2008b) –, while it is, according to the second acceptation, “a matter of degree: [. . .] some narratives are more narrative than others” (Prince 2005, 387).9 Prince concretises the second acceptation by enumerating some of the optional features that are considered to influence the degree of narrativity. He draws on the extent of a narrative’s wholeness, parameters concerning the eventfulness of what is represented, the amount of commentary, the “disnarrated” (see Prince 1988)10 and Ryan’s (1991) “virtual embedded narratives”.11 Finally, he adds a third aspect of narrativity, namely Ryan’s (1992) “modes of narrativity”. Ryan distinguishes twelve plot parameters, which “define standard aspects of narrativity” (Ryan 1992, 382) and represent “various ways in which a text relies on a narrative structure (or plot, or story) and suggests this structure as a model of coherence” (1992, 369).12 All in all, Prince’s three-fold meta-definition could be said to shape the notion of narrativity according to three guiding questions:

8 As Sternberg remarks critically, the question of “[w]hether these ‘optional features’ belong to the issue is not at all clear; but their subsumption under the same umbrella term (narrativity) is clearly misleading. At best, such optional features would bear not on narrativity itself – already established otherwise as a distinctive generic ‘quality’ – but on what I call ‘narrativity-plus’” (2010, 507–508). 9 Audet finds this division little effective because “the two dimensions cal[l] each other” (Audet 2007, 25). 10 Prince (1988) distinguishes three negative narrative categories, the “unnarratable”, the “unnarrated” and the “disnarrated”. The first denotes “that which, according to a given narrative, cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating” (1988, 1, orig. emphasis); the second draws on “all the frontal and lateral ellipses found in narrative and either explicitly underlined by the narrator [. . .] or inferable from a significant lacuna in the chronology” (Prince 1988, 2); the third refers to “all the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (2). The idea of the “narratable” has been concretised by Bremond (1980, 405). 11 See Ryan (1991, 148–174, 274). The idea of “virtual embedded narratives” refers to ways in which “plots interweave a factual sequence of objectively happening events with virtual scripts produced in the minds of characters by activities such as dreaming, imagining, planning, wishing, promising, or fearing” (Ryan 2005c, 628). For further details, see section 6.3.1. 12 I would like to give three examples in order to illustrate which kinds of (plot-related) narrativity Ryan (1992) proposes to distinguish: (i) the plot of “simple narrativity”, for instance, “revolves around a single problem, punch line, or point and ends when the problem is resolved” (1992, 372); (ii) in “complex narrativity”, micro narratives “expand the universe of the main plot” (372); (iii) in “diluted narrativity”, “the plot [. . .] competes for attention with nonnarrative elements such as extended descriptions, metanarrative comments, digressions [etc.]” (375).

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(i) Is a semiotic object a “narrative” – and according to which properties? (ii) How narrative is a semiotic object – according to which optional features? (iii) Which mode of narrativity is created by the narrative object? A more detailed reading of Prince’s article, however, lays bare further questions, which concern, on the one hand, the researcher who theorises narrativity and, on the other, readers of narratives. While Prince relates narrativehood to the “set of properties characterising narratives and distinguishing them from nonnarratives” and thus probably to a method of definition via necessary and sufficient conditions, he connects the scalar idea of narrativity with “the set of features that make narratives more prototypically narrative-like” – that is, with a definition in terms of prototypicality. He thus poses the following question: (iv) Which method of definition is adequate to the object of research? Moreover, Prince notes that scalar narrativity raises the question of which optional features are “more immediately identified, processed, and interpreted as narratives”. He thus brings the reader into play, more precisely the rapidity of his or her text processing and the interpretative ascription of narrativity. This aspect corresponds to the following question: (v) Which role does the reader play in the creation of narrativity? It should be noted that the first three questions allow the idea of an objectively identifiable narrativity, which can be measured, identified and distinguished from other types of discourse, text or genre to be maintained. The last two questions, by contrast, implicitly impair the optimism of an objective definition inasmuch as they bring into play outer-textual, subjective factors, namely methodological decisions of the researcher as well as readerly reactions and judgments of narrative texts. The structure of Prince’s meta-definition has been taken up by H. Porter Abbott who, in his article on narrativity in the Handbook of Narratology (2014), equally starts by opposing “two senses” of narrativity: “the narrativeness of narrative”, which refers to the concept of narrative in a “fixed sense” (i.e., narrativehood) versus “the narrativeness of a narrative”, “applied comparatively to particular narratives” in a “scalar sense” (Abbott 2014, 587). But Abbott makes two important further observations. Firstly, he observes that other terms have [. . .] been drawn into the task of understanding narrativity, including ‘narrativeness’ [. . .], ‘narrativehood,’ ‘narratability,’ ‘tellability’ and ‘eventfulness,’ ‘emplotment’ and ‘narrative’ itself. To define narrative fully, then, requires a survey not only

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of its different conceptual uses, but also of the supporting roles these other terms have been sometimes called on to play. (Abbott 2014, 587)

The narrative factor of eventfulness has also been invoked by Prince, who has ranged it under the optional features that determine the degree of narrativeness. Abbott, by contrast, acknowledges that eventfulness is one of a variety of key terms, which, through their abundance, obviously decompose and diversify the concept of narrativity itself. If, as Abbott suggests, understanding narrativity means necessarily exploring the variety of concepts in terms of which narrativity is defined, then these rivalling concepts burst, in a way, the conceptual unity of narrativity. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have argued, in their cognitive-linguistic theory of conceptual metaphors, that understanding one thing means indeed understanding it in terms of another thing, i.e. metaphorically. Considered from this point of view, understanding narrativity in terms of something else, such as eventfulness,13 is not per se problematic, but it turns into a great challenge as soon as different conceptual metaphors are created – that is, as soon as there is not one, or two, but a large variety of key terms, each of which is supposed to explain (i.e. to be the “right” conceptual metaphor of) narrativity. This is indeed the case in narratology where many further key terms (besides those mentioned above) have been proposed to specify the notion of narrativity (yet in quite different ways),14 such as suspense, curiosity and surprise (see, e.g., Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982; Baroni 2005, 2007; Sternberg 1992, 2006, 2010), canonical narrative schema (see Courtés 1991, 98–123); sequentiality-plus (see Sternberg 2010),15 mimetic versus diegetic narrativity (Nünning and Sommer 2008), narratemes (Wolf 2003),

13 See, e.g., Schmid (2003) and Hühn (2008; 2014). For a criticism of eventfulness as a defining criterion of narrativity, see e.g. Sternberg (2010) and Fludernik (1996, 334–336). 14 The approaches referred to by these key terms vary in a number of methodological and epistemological regards. For example, while some definitions of narrativity focus on a single specific feature, which is argued to be essential to narratives, Wolf (2003) advances the discussion on narrativity significantly by performing a methodological shift away from the production of continually new key terms that highlight alternative key factors of narrativity towards an examination of how various narrative key factors jointly constitute (different levels of) narrative manifestation. See section 2.5.2. 15 With this term, Sternberg (2010, 543–552) denotes models of narrativity that provide event sequentiality with further (thematic, perspectival, causal, etc.) devices of cohesiveness. He criticises these and other definitions for their adherence to an “objectivist” paradigm, defending, for his part, a functionalist approach that defines narrativity in terms of “the play of suspense/ curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form)” (2010, 642).

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logic of narrativity (Sturgess 1989; 1992), experientiality (Fludernik 1996; 2003; Caracciolo 2014) and narrative worldmaking (Herman 2013a, b). Comparing Prince’s and Abbott’s meta-definitions, one can say that Prince’s meta-definition of narrativity provides the concept of narrativity with an order that Abbott, nearly ten years later, somehow relativises with regard to the confusing diversity of alternative notions. Unsurprisingly therefore, Abbot questions the aim or possibility of objectively defining narrativity at all. Drawing on the historical shift from formalist to interaction-based approaches and on the related “expansion of disciplinary applications” of narrativity, Abbott presents the following reflection: As what one might call an ‘adjectival’ noun, narrativity suggests connotatively a felt quality,16 something that may not be entirely definable or may be subject to gradations. Ryan’s distinction between ‘being a narrative’ and ‘possessing narrativity’ [. . .] brings out the difference: where a narrative is a ‘semiotic object,’ narrativity consists in ‘being able to inspire a narrative response’ [. . .]. This flexibility and comparative freedom from restrictive categorizing (must a narrative have more than one event? [. . .] must narrative events be causally connected? [. . .] must they involve human or humanlike entities? [. . .]) also gives the term a user-friendliness. (Abbott 2014, 588)

Abbott’s considerations lay bare a tension, only latently present in Prince’s article, between the objectivist aspirations and the subjectivist implications of the concept of narrativity. Abbott’s “user-friendliness” underscores the fact that “narrativity” is the result of individual, subjective acts of ascribing a “narrative” quality to semiotic artefacts. Abbott’s statement quoted above even points to two further problems of the definition of narrativity. Firstly, it is not clear where narrativity can be found. Is it in the “narrative” artefact or in the “narrative” access of the reader? If, as Abbott suggests, narrativity “consists in ‘being able to inspire a narrative response’”, then narrativity pertains to both sides: to the artefact, but only in terms of a potential (the object is “able to inspire” a narrative response), and to the receiver who exploits this potential in his “narrative response”. This brings a second problem of definition into play, namely

16 Several scholars highlight the role that pre-theoretical knowledge or intuition should play for narrative theory. Ricœur, for instance, explains: “Fictional narrative [. . .] has already, as a narrative, been made the object of both a practice and a form of understanding before semiotics comes on the scene” (1985, 32). Sternberg, for his part, makes a plea for the guiding role of narrative intuition: “If, as often declared, we all know a narrative when we encounter one, then our analytic inquiries must begin by articulating and orienting themselves to this intuitive sense of narrativity” (2010, 512).

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the ontological status of narrativity. Should it be understood virtually17 as an inherent potential of semiotic objects (virtual status) or as the actualised quality that results from the exploitation of this potential (realised status)? And what about the processes that lead from the former to the latter?18 After his initial, two-fold definition of narrativity and the explication of the term, Abbott offers (in the section “History of the Concept and its Study”) a fourfold systematisation, which is supposed to organise the concept at “the broadest level of abstraction” (Abbott 2014, 589). He distinguishes between . . . (i) . . . narrativity “as inherent or extensional” (590–593), according to which narrativity is understood as “inherent, determinative, and co-extensive with any particular narrative” (590). This category includes theories of narrative immanence, of emplotment and of the logic of narrativity. (ii) . . . narrativity as “scalar or intensional” (593–600). According to Abbott, this conception generally involves an interpretative stance. It includes various theoretical positions, which are based on eventfulness, tellability, narrative competence, experientiality and fictionality as well as those that are centred on sequentiality, including additional (causal, cognitive, etc.) requirements of sequential connectivity or intersequentiality. (iii) . . . narrativity as “a variable according to narrative type, genre, or mode” (600–601). With this heading, Abbott seems to cover theories that understand narrativity not as a unified concept, but as a gamut, which covers (i) different generic kinds of narrativity (the differing narrativities of ghost stories, psychological novel, gothic novel, etc.), (ii) different modes of coherency (e.g. Ryan’s [1992] simple, complex, diluted [etc.] narrativities) or (iii) kinds of narrativity that differ from each other in terms of degrees of prototypicality or canonicity (e.g. the narrativity of historiographic versus avant-garde narratives).19 (iv) . . . narrative as “a mode among modes” (Abbott 2014, 601–602). What is at stake here is not the diversification of kinds of narrativity, but what distinguishes narrativity from other generic modes or text types. The question is

17 See Ryan’s (2005c) overview on the role that virtuality plays in narratology. 18 My pyramidal model of narrativity proposes an answer to these questions (see section 2.4). 19 This category includes inter alia Herman’s (2002) “preference-rule systems”, which should allow to model “generic variations among the totality of narrative genres” (Abbott 2014, 600), Ryan’s (1992) theory of modes of narrativity, Hühn’s (2014) distinction between a broad and narrow definition of narrativity, Fludernik’s (1996) characterisation of historiography via “restricted narrativity” and McHale’s (2001) “weak narrativity” of avant-garde narrative poetry. For a criticism of McHale’s concept, see Sternberg (2010, 618).

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to know how to handle theoretically the co-presence of different modes within one and the same semiotic object.20 What immediately leaps out in this categorisation is the large correspondence between the structures of Abbott’s and Prince’s meta-definitions. Abbott’s first three categories correspond (with slight modifications and many expansions) to Prince’s three “acceptations” of narrativity, while the fourth category has been added by Abbott in order to include further reflections on the generic borderlines of narrativity. The modifications carried out by Abbott are interesting inasmuch as they reveal the problems inherent in meta-definitional orders. One of these problems concerns the categorical divide between the different classes of narrativity. A comparison of Abbott’s and Prince’s first category (narrativehood/inherent or extensional narrativity) lays bare the covert connections that cut transversally across the gaps between the categories. Abbott modifies Prince’s first category of narrativehood by calling it “inherent or extensional” narrativity. These two adjectives, however, are not synonymous. While the concept of “extension” refers, in accordance with Prince, to the set of semiotic objects to which the adjective “narrative” can be ascribed (against the set of non-narrative semiotic objects), the idea of inherency has not been introduced by Prince (although it can be said to fill the theoretical gap that Prince’s [2005] extensional narrativehood opens up).21 According to Abbott’s meta-definition (as I summarise it), theories of inherency understand narrativity not in terms of specific, gradable features, but as a holistic phenomenon, which is (argued to be) substantial in equal manner for each and every narrative text. What Abbott ranges under this heading of “inherency” are Greimas’s assumption of a deep level of narrativity,22 Ricœur’s idea of a temporalnarrative “first-order intelligence”, which is dialectically intertwined with narrative “emplotment”, and White’s hypothesis of the narrative shape of cultural,

20 Under this heading, Abbott subsumes inter alia Chatman’s (1990) distinction between narrative and non-narrative text-types (argument, exposition, description), the Russian formalist concept of “the dominant”, the problem of generic hybrids and the contrast between narrativity and the notions of “lyricality” and “portraiture” (see Phelan 2007). 21 Prince’s first “acceptation” of narrativity as narrativehood opens a gap inasmuch as he does not substantiate the idea of narrativehood: What does it consists of according to which theories? Abbott’s meta-definition has thus the merit of concretising narrativehood by presenting theories that can be ranged under this heading. This concretisation, however, is possible only due to a slight conceptual shift, from narrativehood (which actually draws on the method of non-scalar defining) to “inherency” (which represents a content-related umbrella term for conceptions of narrativity that make use of this non-scalar method of defining). 22 See section 2.3.4.

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historical and fictional meanings. Interestingly, Ricœur’s theory of emplotment, on which Abbott draws under the category of “inherent” narrativity, does imply the criterion of narrative wholeness: [. . .] le seul trait formel qui doive être préservé de la notion aristotélicienne de muthos [. . .] c’est le critère d’unité et de complétude. Or une action est une et complète [. . .] si le commencement introduit le milieu, si le milieu [. . .] conduit à la fin et si la fin conclut le milieu. Alors la configuration l’emporte sur l’épisode, la concordance sur la discordance. Il est donc légitime de prendre pour symptôme de la fin de la tradition de mise en intrigue l’abandon du critère de complétude [. . .]. (Ricœur 1984, 35–36)23

Prince (2005, 387), however, places questions of narrative wholeness not in the first category of narrativehood, but in the second, gradable category of narrativeness (which corresponds to Abbott’s second category of “scalar” narrativity).24 At this point, the category of narrativeness begins to overlap with that of narrativehood, since too high a degree of anticlosure is considered to lead to the denial of the narrative status. The theoretical separation of narrativehood and narrativeness, or, respectively, of inherent/extensional and scalar/intensional narrativity therefore becomes suspect.25

23 “[. . .] [T]he one formal feature of the Aristotelian notion of muthos that has to be preserved [. . .] is the criterion of unity and completeness. [. . .] And an action is whole and complete [. . .] if the beginning introduces the middle, if the middle [. . .] leads to the end, and if the end concludes the middle. Then the configuration wins out over the episodic form, concordance overcomes discordance. Hence it is legitimate to take as a symptom of the end of the paradigmatic tradition of emplotment the abandonment of the criterion of completeness [. . .]” (Ricœur 1985, 20). Ricœur, however, does not think that the tradition of emplotment has reached its end. He argues that wholeness, concordance and the systematic arrangement of the incidents of life, which characterise non-literary language, have to be conserved as the governing principle of narratives. See Ricœur (1985, 22, 28). 24 This makes sense inasmuch as Ricœur himself reflects on the “threshold” (see Ricœur 1985, 22) beyond which the lack of emplotment of a literary work should lead to its exclusion from the realm of narratives. 25 This overlap between narrativehood and narrativeness has also been theorised by Herman (2002), who states that “[t]here may be a threshold past which differences of degree effectively become differences of kind” (2002, 100). Herman, for his part, has then been attacked by Sternberg for whom “binarism” and “gradationism”, understood as “two definitional logics” (Sternberg 2010, 619) combined by Herman, are incompatible. I wonder how the strict separation between questions of kind and questions of degree, advocated by Sternberg, coheres with Sternberg’s conviction that scales of narrativity have thresholds beyond which narrativehood must be denied, namely with regard to “measuring degrees of narrativity by the tightness (likelihood, followability) of the event chain. This criterion might work in theory, as the range modulates from the nonlinkage or non sequitur of the impossible enchainment, through the looseness of the possible, to the firmness of the probable; but thereafter probability would

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Does it make sense to use narrativehood and narrativeness as metadefinitional categories in terms of which complex theories of narrativity could be ranged alternatively? It seems to me that the drawback of Prince’s and Abbott’s categorical separation of (three or four) senses of narrativity consists primarily of the fact that it conceals the conceptual connections that exist between their classes of definitions. Meta-definitional classes do not allow those dimensions of narrativity that cut across the classificatory boundaries to be taken into account. Furthermore, theories or definitions of narrativity often combine various theoretical elements or building-blocks and not all of them fit into one and the same meta-definitional class. Consider, for example, Ryan’s (1992) theory of modes of narrativity, ranged in Abbott’s third category (narrativity as a variable according to narrative type, genre, or mode). One of the modes analysed by Ryan is “embryonic narrativity”, which she illustrates by referencing Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” – a text that presents a setting, but fails to present any events or actions. For Ryan, this mode is “embryonic” because, in her understanding, events and actions (i.e. eventfulness) are one of the basic requirements of narrativity. The narrativity of the text thus exists as a potential, as something that might develop, but that is not yet developed. Eventfulness, however, is a criterion that Abbott ranges principally under his second category (of “scalar narrativity”). Ryan’s mode of “embryonic narrativity” thus blurs the boundaries between Abbott’s second and third meta-categories. This example reveals that the complex, multi-dimensional nature of narrative theories (i.e. the ways in which theories combine diverse factors or modes of narrativity) fails to comply with rough classifications. In other words, the compositional nature of (concepts of) narrativity casts doubts on the adequacy of meta-definitional taxonomies, since taxonomic classes require a homogeneity that does not inhere in multifactorial approaches and/or in the inner heterogeneity of narrativity. To conclude, by analysing and comparing the meta-definitions of Prince (2005) and Abbott (2014), we have found . . .

gradually approach necessity, and with it redundancy, which militates against narrativity [. . .]” (Sternberg 2010, 614). Sternberg also criticises Herman’s linkage of narrativehood and narrativeness to different “levels”. He observes that narrativehood depends for Herman on “the enactment of a goal-directed sequence” (Sternberg 2010, 619) and thus on the level of story, while scalar narrativity depends on “the balance of the stereotypical and the unprecedented” and thus on the receiver’s “mental response” (which Sternberg blunderingly identifies with “narrative discourse”). Sternberg notes that “the components of the mixture pull still further apart, and how they compose, let alone cooperate in or beyond the genre’s definition, is only harder to imagine” (2010, 619).

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(i) . . . that there are fundamental problems to the definition of narrativity, which cannot be represented by taxonomic classifications (objectivist aims versus subjective implications; double localisation of narrativity in the reader and in the text; rivalling methods of definition; obscure ontological status of narrativity); (ii) . . . that the boundary between their categories is not as clear-cut as the structure of their meta-definitions suggests (e.g. narrativehood versus narrativeness); (iii) . . . that dimensions (i.e., factors or elements) of narrativity that are separated by the classificatory structure of the meta-definitions happen to be closely intertwined in or combined by theories of narrativity, such that these theories do not fit into any one meta-definitional category. There is no doubt that the meta-definitions considered above have the great merit of ordering the chaotic diversity of narratological approaches. They do so by sorting out basic dichotomies and dimensions of narrativity. Nonetheless, the order that they offer is only relative; surely, it allows for the acknowledgement of certain dimensions of and borderlines within narrativity, but at the price of concealing other theoretical connections and other possibilities of categorisation. The last meta-definition,26 which I would like to consider, has been presented by Sternberg in his voluminous article “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm” (2010), which continues the line of thought developed in Sternberg’s earlier work, such as the threefold series “Telling in Time” (see Sternberg 1990, 1992, 2006; see also 2001). As far as I see, Sternberg has provided the most extensive and systematic research review on existing concepts of narrativity. The structure offered in his article deviates significantly from those presented by Prince (2005) and Abbott (2014) insofar as Sternberg distinguishes (only) two “paradigms” of definitions, namely “objectivist” and “functionalist” definitions. According to Sternberg, objectivist approaches ascribe narrativity “to some event form” and consider it as an “inherent”27 (2010, 516) 26 Sternberg’s article provides, however, not only a meta-definition, but also a proper definition of narrativity (see below). 27 It should be noted that not all definitions discussed by Sternberg can be said to rely on an idea of inherent eventfulness. Indeed, all definitions that include pragmatic dimensions cannot be summarised under this label, especially Fludernik (1996). This is why Abbott ascribes “inherency” only to one of his classes of definitions (and even places Sternberg into this category!). I suppose that it is Sternberg’s decision to oppose his own approach to nearly all other existing approaches that forces him to provide a common label for all of the other approaches. Such a label can hardly do justice to the broad diversity of theories that Sternberg attacks simultaneously, as if they were a homogeneous mass.

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quality, while functionalist definitions underscore that narrativity is “mappable on very different-looking surfaces in the finished text” (Sternberg 2010, 516). Sternberg distinguishes twelve classes of objectivist definitions.28 Most of these definitions take account of the intuition that telling a story means that something (tellable) has happened. According to Sternberg, objectivist definitions span from single-event hypotheses – according to which narratives recount a “change of state” – via event series or a sequence of events to an eventhood that is specified by additional criteria such as, for example, cohesiveness, causality or intentionality. He criticises these approaches from different angles, proposing, for his part, a functionalist approach, which is based on the socalled Proteus Principle.29 Sternberg argues that narrativity is constituted by the “three universals” (2010, 641) of suspense, curiosity and surprise, which are considered to be the “three master functions of narrative” (Sternberg 1992, 534).30 They are created in the mind of the receiver as a result of “discontinuities [. . .] between the telling/reading and the told sequence” (Sternberg 2010, 640). Each of these “master interests” has its own “gapping-to-gap-filling teleology” (Sternberg 2010, 640) and denotes the effects of three different prospective versus retrospective activities of the receiver. I would like to highlight two aspects, which create a sharp contrast between Sternberg’s approach, on the one hand, and Prince’s and Abbott’s approach on the other. Firstly, Sternberg considers the opposition of narrativehood and

28 For a more elaborate and detailed description of Sternberg’s approach, please see section 2.3.3 and 2.4.6. 29 According to the Proteus Principle, introduced by Sternberg (1982), linguistic forms (i.e. formal features) cannot be mapped unambiguously on representational (authorial or receptive) functions or effects: there is no “automatic tie-up” (Sternberg 1992, 537) between them, but only an “endless form/function interplay” (Sternberg 2006, 126). 30 Much earlier, Brewer and Lichtenstein examined the same three phenomena as “three major discourse structures which account for the enjoyment of a large proportion of stories” (Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982, 480). The authors do, however, not equate these phenomena with narrativity. Instead, they assign surprise, suspense and curiosity to “stories”, the latter being understood as “a subclass of narratives which have entertainment as their primary discourse force” (477–478). They hold that “[m]any current works of ‘serious literature’ do not have entertainment as their primary discourse force and thus would not be considered stories by this definition” (478). They therefore exclude avant-garde literature from their scope of examination (see 484). Concerning the universal validity of suspense, curiosity and surprise as defining features of narratives, Baroni adopts a medium position between that of Brewer and Lichtenstein and Sternberg inasmuch as he designates narrative tension “a fundamental trait of narrativity” (“trait fondamental de la narrativité”, Baroni 2007, 18) and a “tensional quality of narrativity” (“qualité tensive de la narrativité”, 55) and describes suspense, curiosity and surprise as “thymical components that connote narrativity” (“composantes thymiques qui connotent la narrativité”, 121).

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narrativeness not as two ways of understanding narrativity, i.e. not as two coexistent meanings, which naturally structure the concept, but as two rivalling “definitional logics” (2010, 619) between which one has to choose.31 He advocates the definitional logic of narrativehood, arguing that a “well-defined concept of narrativity” should gain “a univocal sense (distinctive features) and reference (class membership)” (2010, 508).32 He denies the concept of scalar narrativity any explanatory power. Although, as Sternberg claims, the scalar nature of narrativity may correspond to our impression that some stories are more narrative than others, “[v]iable gradation depends on the application of a homogenous and motivated criterion on the whole generic front [. . .]. But no such criterion has been found, or can be found, along the existing objectivist lines”, since “the criteria postulated for narrativity (e.g., eventhood, humanity, enchainment, closure, planning, categoricalness, experientiality) are obviously just too heterogeneous and autonomous to reduce to any single gradable feature-cum-range” (2010, 613). Sternberg also dismisses a second, scalar concept of narrativity, as proposed by Ryan (2007), according to which the degree of narrativity depends on the number of fulfilled conditions of narrativity: “the sheer number of criterial features exhibited (‘how many’) cannot quantify ‘degree[s] [sic] of narrativity,’ because some criteria (e.g., change) outweigh others (e.g., closure [. . .])” (Sternberg 2010, 617). Secondly, the concept of “function” (inherent in Sternberg’s “functionalist paradigm”) highlights the simultaneous localisation of narrativity in the text and in the reader (who engages in gap-filling activities) inasmuch as it interconnects the two. Functions denote, in the present context, purposes or effects that textual structures have for/on readers. The opposition between text and reader is at the core of Sternberg’s opposition between an objectivist and a functionalist methodology insofar as objectivist definitions are based on the idea of a “narrative” substance that can be found in the text, while functionalist definitions seek to determine the “narrative” effects that texts exert on the reader. I wonder, however, whether Sternberg’s dichotomy of paradigms really gets to the heart of the matter, since the “objectivist” theories that he dismisses can partly be reformulated in functionalist terms. An example in case is Herman’s (2009a) Basic Elements of Narrative. According to Herman’s fourth “element” of

31 “The definer must choose between two irreconcilable logics, and with them two paradigms of narratology and narrative study at large, from the foundations upward” (Sternberg 2010, 634). 32 Audet argues for a “non-scalar conception of narrativity” as well, but he proposes instead “to approach the narrativity in its various manifestations and in its role in the construction of a work” (2007, 11).

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narrative, narrative representation “conveys what it is like to live through [a] storyworld in flux” (2009a, 9); Herman thus theorises narrativity in terms of a representational function. So does Fludernik (1996; 2003), although Fludernik and Herman disagree on what it is that narratives have the function to represent. Is it a “structured time-course of particularized events” and “some sort of disruption” (Herman 2009a, 9) or an “experiential function” (Fludernik 1996, 357)? However one answers this question, it is obvious that Fludernik’s and Herman’s approaches are indeed perfectly compatible with Sternberg’s “functionalist” proposal to find a “unique generic purpose, [. . .] mappable on very differentlooking surfaces in the finished text” (2010, 516). The difference between their approaches thus seems to reside not in their “functionalist” versus “objectivist” designs – indeed, one of the major merits of Fludernik’s framework is its aptitude to account for reader subjectivity –, but in the way they define narrative functionality, be it by concrete cognitive-emotive contents, which result from narrative processing (Fludernik; Herman), or by more abstract feelings of reception, which emerge during narrative processing due to the interplay of narrative story and discourse (Sternberg). Considered from this perspective, Sternberg’s opposition turns out to conceal and to imply another opposition, namely that between concrete or content-related and abstract or form-related definitions. But by what right should one favour the one over the other? Why should readerly feelings of suspense33 (or the corresponding cognitive activity of “prognosis”, see Baroni 2007, 111), curiosity (“diagnosis”, see 111) and surprise be more “narrative” than the readerly immersion into a particular storyworld (see e.g. Herman 2013a, b) or the experience of a fictional consciousness (see e.g. Cohn 1978; Fludernik 1996; Palmer 2004)? Why should the dynamics of gap-filling (“gapping-to-gap-filling teleology”, Sternberg 2010, 640) be more narrative than the narrative gestalt that results from gap-filling? By what right should one exclude concrete mental processes (e.g., imaging, empathising, evaluating) from the definition in favour of an abstract chrono-teleological dynamics?34 Sternberg’s “meta-narratological” classification thus turns out to be less “meta-” than it appears at first sight; it simply ranks certain dimensions of

33 Baroni refers to this kind of tension as “the anticipatory uncertainty that the interpreter feels during the aesthetic experience” (“l’incertitude anticipatrice qu’éprouve l’interprète durant l’expérience esthétique”, 2007, 18). 34 Caracciolo criticises Sternberg’s approach, claiming that “suspense, curiosity and surprise are far from being specific to narrative: people can feel them towards real events, too [. . .]” (2014, 44). While I am critical about Sternberg’s approach as well, Caracciolo’s argument does not seem to be very strong inasmuch as real life and its events can be perceived in terms of narrative patterns as well (see Bruner 1991).

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narrativity over others: narrativehood over narrativeness, temporal over experiential dynamics,35 feelings of reception over representational contents. Each of the meta-definitions offered by Prince, Abbott and Sternberg systematises the chaotic multitude of rivalling concepts of narrativity. Nonetheless, as their comparison shows, these meta-definitions are not necessarily consistent with each other. The more they are incompatible, the more they compete with each other. This competition creates a new, higher-order chaos (on the level of “meta-narratology”, see Figure 2), which continues, in a way, the lowerlevel chaos of narratological definitions of narrativity. Furthermore, if metanarratological orders are based on a relatively subjective ranking or grouping of narrative factors, then the objective validity of these meta-definitions is open to debate because, on the one hand, one could weigh and group these factors otherwise and because, on the other hand, there are narrative dimensions that cut transversally across (or, as Deleuze would put it, “grow between”) taxonomic categories. The validity of meta-narratological orders is thereby not necessarily devaluated, but it becomes relativised. The question is to know whether a taxonomy is suited at all to structuring definitions of narrativity. If each metaorder conceals other, equally possible orders, then each fixed order becomes somewhat arbitrary.36 In other words, the order offered by each meta-definition becomes relative in view of rivalling meta-orders. This relativity amounts to a confusion of tongues at the spire of the Babylonian Tower of definitions. Even here, narrativity refers not to a single, but to diverse (possible) conceptual orders, and thus to diverse meanings. While each understanding of narrativity presupposes an order, each order automatically precludes (and contrasts with) other orders. Yet, it is only by structuring the debate that we can gain access to it and understand it. It is this kind of epistemological challenge that has been taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in the fifth and sixth principle (of “cartography and decalcomania”) of the rhizome: Tout autre est le rhizome, carte et non pas calque. [. . .] Si la carte s’oppose au calque, c’est qu’elle est tout entière tournée vers une expérimentation en prise sur le réel. [. . .] Elle fait

35 Fludernik states that Sternberg sets another focus than she does. While he focuses on the temporal (chrono- and teleological) plane, she underscores the experiential plane of the reading process (see Fludernik 1996, 322). This is a valid observation, which points to a fundamental problem of the definition of narrativity: every approach highlights different dimensions of narrative. The notion thus undergoes excessive diversification and loses its conceptual unity. 36 Sternberg, for his part, criticises a related arbitrariness, which, however, does not take place at the spire of the Babylonian Tower (i.e., on the level of meta-definitions), but in the middle of the Tower, causing the diversity of rivalling “objectivist” definitions of narrativity (see Sternberg 2010, 615–616).

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elle-même partie du rhizome. La carte est ouverte, elle est connectable dans toutes ses dimensions, démontable, renversable, susceptible de recevoir constamment des modifications. [. . .] C’est peut-être un des caractères les plus importants du rhizome, d’être toujours à entrées multiples; [. . .] Une carte a des entrées multiples, contrairement au calque qui revient toujours ‘au même’. Une carte est affaire de performance, tandis que le calque renvoie toujours à une ‘compétence’ prétendue. (Deleuze et Guattari 1980, 20, orig. emphasis)37

Like the rhizome, the debate on narrativity has “multiple entryways”: one can enter the debate (and the concept) only in terms of a specific order, but one needs to acknowledge that there are multiple ways of “entering”, connecting and ordering definitional dimensions. Moreover, meta-definitions arise as “competent tracings” of a structure that objectively underlies the chaos of narrativity (much like a hidden deep structure), but perhaps they should be better conceptualised as different ways of “mapping” the notion of narrativity – performatively rather than competently. In other words, it is important for scholars to acknowledge the active, creative role that they assume: the creation of a meta-narratological order is a “performance” (rather than a more or less “competent representation”) and, most importantly, this performance feeds back on the notion of narrativity itself.38 ⁂ One floor beneath the meta-level of the “Babylonian Tower” of narrativity (see Figure 2), (first-order) definitions of narrativity run into an analogous problem. Just as each meta-definition is confronted with a chaotic multitude of first-order definitions, each first-order definition is confronted with a multitude of narrative dimensions. Just as it is not clear on which basis meta-definitions provide one rather than another definitional feature with a meta-definitional (ordering) status, it remains opaque why definitions of narrativity provide one rather than another narrative dimension (or a bundle of dimensions) with a definitional status.

37 “The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. [. . .] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. [. . .] It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. [. . .] Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; [. . .] A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing which always comes back to ‘the same.’ The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12–13). 38 This feedback is due to the fact that narrativity denotes the whole “tower” of definitions (see Figure 2) to which meta-orders add a new layer.

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Fortunately, there seems to be increasing awareness of this relativity of definitions: We do not believe that there is a single, best definition of narrative. Any definition, because it implies a particular orientation, brings with it a particular set of emphases and serves a particular set of interests. That is, any definition highlights certain characteristics of individual narratives while obscuring or effacing others. (Phelan and Rabinowitz in Herman et al. 2012, 5)

The problem that arises from this relativity of definitions, however, is theoretical chaos. If each definition of narrativity is based on different kinds of narrative and/or highlights different narrative features, then everyone understands something else under the heading of “narrativity”. Sternberg’s overview on what has been understood, in “objectivist approaches”, under the label of “narrativity” illustrates well this diversification of narrativity. I have added a short list of the twelve classes of definitions identified by Sternberg, which I will try to summarise in a simplified manner (in order to give a sketchy idea of what the class embraces at large). According to Sternberg’s classification, narrativity is identified with . . . (i) . . . a single event at least (hypothesis: narratives represent a change of state over time) (see Sternberg 2010, 520–523). (ii) . . . an event or eventhood understood as action (hypothesis: narratives recount human acts or action, not natural happenings) (see 523–527); (iii) . . . an event plus other reality items (hypothesis: narratives recount not only an event, but also tell us something about existents, anthropomorphic agents, a setting, or other elements of a diegetic world) (see 528–531); (iv) . . . a series of events, from two upward (hypothesis: narratives tell a series of events in a time sequence) (see 531–543); (v) . . . events organised into “sequentiality-plus” (hypothesis: narratives tell about events that somehow form a cohesive, intelligible whole, i.e. a coherent story) (see 543–546); (vi) . . . events linked into a causal chain (hypothesis: narratives tell about events that are more or less tightly causally connected; example: assumption of narrative beginning-middle-end structures) (see 546–573); (vii) . . . events marked and/or lengthened in semantic terms, including thought at large, an agent’s goal-directedness and intentional activity further specified (see 574–580); (viii) . . . events with a thematic thread running through them for extra continuity (hypothesis: narratives are governed by a subject matter or by another unifying instance, such as the narrator) (see 581–582);

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(ix)

. . . an event sequence with patterns of equivalence imposed on it (hypothesis: the narrative event sequence is enriched by a structural plus on the level of discourse, namely by semantic or thematic similarities or contrasts) (see 582–589); (x) . . . an eventhood under a determinate ontology, especially fictional (hypothesis: narratives recount fictional events) (see 589–593); (xi) . . . an eventhood that is categorical rather than modalised (hypothesis: narratives recount fictionally factual rather than fictionally possible or probable events; this is a matter of the degree of narrativity) (see 593–598); (xii) . . . one-off rather than deconcretised eventhood (hypothesis: narratives tell about events that are not habitual or recurrent, but rather unique in space-time) (see 598–600). Sternberg’s analysis impresses with its systematicity and the broad range of definitions taken into consideration. Nonetheless, I would like to point to four problems of this categorisation. First of all, eventhood is by no means the basic idea of all approaches to narrativity other than Sternberg’s.39 Fludernik, for example, discussed by Sternberg primarily under (vii), criticises on her part “events-in-succession” theories: “It is not temporality per se that ‘makes’ narrative; or if so, that temporality relates more to the reading process than to the context of the story” (1996, 21). Her concept of narrativity is not well summarised with the notion of “event” (in terms of which Sternberg labels all objectivist approaches), since, for Fludernik, narrativity is “primarily based on a consciousness factor rather than on actantial dynamics or teleological directedness” (1996, 30).40 Furthermore, she explicitly defends a “constructivist” rather than an objectivist notion of narrativity (see 1996, 37, 40, 316). Secondly, Sternberg’s label of eventhood obscures the fact that there are fundamentally different notions of the event. They range from inherent, textimmanent eventhood (the event must be represented by the text) to eventhood 39 See, e.g., Bres (1994), Fludernik (1996), Rudrum (2006), Baroni (2007; 2009) or Askin (2015). 40 Nonetheless, Fludernik’s theory is quite ambivalent. While she underlines in some passages that consciousness and “embodied” experientiality are at the core of narrativity and prevail over plot, action or eventfulness (“existence takes priority over action parameters”, 1996, 27), agency, plotting and temporal directness is an important part (of the first level) of her four-level model (see 43). One could also defend Sternberg’s “event” label with regard to narrativisation, which is equally at the core of Fludernik’s model. Is the process of narrativisation not an event? Even if one agreed with this view, the event of narrativisation would refer primarily to the cognitive activities of the reader, not to an “inherent” quality of narrative texts. Sternberg’s categorisation thus risks labelling quite different approaches and ideas under one and the same header (see below).

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as a pragmatic phenomenon (the reader perceives some textual properties as eventful). Audet’s (2007, 31–34) approach can serve as an example. He explicitly distinguishes three kinds of events, which are bound to different levels of narrative communication: (i) an action or a combination of actions, inherent in the story, presented by the text; (ii) a “discursive event”, i.e., an event that happens on the level of narrative discourse, including meta-narrative reflections; (iii) an “operal event” according to which it is the reader’s interaction with the semiotic object, i.e. the artistic experience, which is eventful. The last kind of event thus does not comply with any “objectivist” idea of represented eventfulness. This leads us to the third problem of Sternberg’s summary: some approaches reject the ideas of quantification and representation, which underlie Sternberg’s twelve classes. Audet (2007), for instance, argues “against the common model of the representation of actions, on behalf of a more phenomenological41 perspective: the narrative is based on the fact that there is an event [in the mind of the receiver, ESW] (and not on an ensemble of countable events [in the text, ESW])” (2007, 10, emphasis mine). As Audet emphasises with regard to the photography of Lynne Cohen, narrativity is not necessarily something that is objectively present in semiotic objects, but can be something that operates “on the mode of virtuality” (2007, 15). Such nuances are suppressed by Sternberg’s overview. Fourthly, by subsuming all rivalling theories under the key word of “event”, Sternberg flattens the complexity of the field of definitions. This complexity manifests itself, on the one hand, in the broad range of key concepts that have been proposed to define narrativity. Some theorists conceive of narrativity in terms of one of these various key concepts,42 other theorists consider (some of) them to be narrative factors or dimensions whose combination produces narrativity and/ or narrative.43 On the other hand, the complexity of the field of definitions consists of various polarities, which divide the field of theories into rivalling camps. So far, we have touched only on some of them, such as the opposition of “functionalist” versus “objectivist” definitions, of “narrativehood” versus “narrativeness” or the rivalry between “plot” and “consciousness” as the main

41 I seek to do justice to this “phenomenological perspective” by including it into my pyramidal model, see section 2.4 (especially section 2.4.8). 42 See, for example, Ricœur’s (1985) idea of a narrative “configuration”, Sturgess’s (1989; 1992) “logic”, Fludernik’s (1996; 2003) “experientiality”, Herman’s (2002) “canonicity and breach” (borrowed from Bruner [1991]) and (2013b) “storyworld”, Audet’s (2007) “event” or Schmid’s (2003) “eventfulness”. 43 See, for example, Prince (1982), Wolf (2003), Ryan (2006) and Caracciolo (2014).

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instances of narrativity.44 But there are many other boundaries and oppositions, which divide the field of research in one way or another. Before I turn to these inner boundaries of narrativity, I would shortly like to address another problem, which is, from my point of view, at the heart of the difficulty of defining narrativity, namely the problem of subjectivity and universality.

2.2 The S/U problem: Specificity versus universality One of the most difficult problems with which each and every theory of narrativity is necessarily confronted is the incompatibility between narrativity’s subjectivity and specificity (understood as individual and subjective responses to specific, extremely different narrative objects) and the theoretical requirement of universality (that is, the aspiration to provide a theoretical model or definition that determines the universal features, criteria or conditions of all narratives). I will refer to this problem hereafter, for the sake of brevity, as the “S/U problem”. Dancygier, for instance, has depicted the problem as follows: One of the most contentious aspects of ‘storiness’ is its idealized status which, as narratologists argue, remains the same in different tellings. The claim calls for an explanation of where such a construct resides. It cannot be an overall interpretation arising in a single reader’s mind, since such a construct would be too specific. If, on the other hand, the concept is expected to remain constant across choices of a medium, across readers, or even across readings [. . .], then it has to be ‘boiled down’ to the sequence of events and some conflict to be resolved. It would then be a very minimalist view of the story. (Dancygier 2012b, 54, emphasis mine)

Definitions of narrativity can thus be said to position themselves on a scalar continuum whose extreme ends are represented by the specificity and subjectivity linked to a particular narrative (including its interpretative meanings) and the universality (i.e., the “poor” minimal conditions) of all kinds of narratives. Although one has to note that there is not even a consensus on a “minimalist” definition of narrative,45 Dancygier identifies indeed a basic problem of

44 Wolf, for instance, criticises Fludernik’s approach because it ranks consciousness over plot: “Her defining quality of ‘experientiality’ concentrates too much on the mere existence of a ‘human protagonist’ and his or her ‘emotional and physical reaction’. [. . .] Perhaps the most problematic aspect of her theory is her attempt to devaluate the element of plot, which hitherto has been a cornerstone of virtually all conceptions of narrativity” (Wolf 2003, 182). 45 As Sternberg puts it, there is a “broad agreement about what ‘narrativity’ [as a term, ESW] should capture”, but a “disagreement about everything else, especially the features and products to be captured through the generic term” (2010, 508).

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definition here, which John Pier describes, more pointedly, as a “gap between theory and the workings of individual narratives” (2004, 264). If theory in general seeks to describe rules or facts that are of (more or less) universal validity, then narratology, as the theory of narrative, must be radically at odds with interpretation, which aims at describing the specific (configuration of) meaning(s) of a particular text. However, as Kindt and Müller (2003a) have explained, there is not even a consensus, in narratology, on the incompatibility of narrative theory and interpretation.46 What further contributes to the S/U problem is the fact that there are two ways of understanding it; one is centred upon the reader, the other upon narrative objects (texts).47 If one understands the S/U problem in terms of the reader, one needs to come to terms with the continuum that spans between the individual, highly subjective experience of narrativity,48 for instance in the form of an “overall interpretation arising in a single reader’s mind”, and the crossindividual, universal, objectively determinable experience of a “narrative” quality. If one considers the S/U problem, by contrast, from a textual angle, one has to bridge the gap between the specific “narrative” qualities of particular narratives and the discovery of a universal “narrative” quality shared by all (and even the most different) “narrative” texts (or semiotic objects). These two sides of the S/U problem are interconnected. I will lay bare this connection by elaborating first on the textual S/U problem and by showing then, how the textual S/U problem is rooted in its readerly counterpart. In order to determine which qualities are shared by all narrative texts, the term narrative text has to be defined. In other words, the corpus of texts that is 46 According to the authors, narratologists conceptualise their discipline in four different ways: (i) autonomist narratology considers itself to be independent from textual interpretation; it restricts narratology to the identification of general characteristics of narratives; (ii) contextualist narratology aims at contributing to interpretation, by way of integrating various (gendered, cultural-historical, etc.) contexts into narratological analysis; (iii) foundationalist narratology considers itself as laying the foundations for textual interpretation, and as being able to evaluate interpretations of narrative texts; and finally (iv) heuristic narratology seeks to provide analytical tools which can be used for interpretation; it considers itself to “supply points of reference for stimulating, structuring and problematizing interpretations” (Kindt and Müller 2003a, 208). 47 What reflects itself in these two ways of understanding the S/U problem is one of the “inner boundaries” of narrativity and narratology, namely that between the text and the reader (see section 2.3.3). 48 Herman, for instance, explains that receivers of narrative artefacts “can have differing intuitions about the degree of narrativity of certain representations – their capacity for interpretation in narrative terms” (2009a, 16). Nonetheless, he attempts to counter this problem of subjectivity in terms of objective criteria, contending that “such discrepancies can be attributed to the gradient nature of some of the basic elements of narrative itself” (2009a, 16).

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or should be covered by theories of narrativity has to be established. Here, opinions diverge as well. Some approaches, such as Prince’s, argue for the exclusion of certain texts, such as Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie, from the realm of narrative and thus of narratological study, since, in his eyes, they do not fulfil what he considers as basic criteria of narrativity: the representation of at least “one [. . .] transformation [. . .] of one [. . .] state of affairs” and “cohesion, consistency and even closure” (Prince 2003, 5–6). Unfortunately, Prince neither explains what to make of such texts, which, excluded from their generic homeland, become “homeless alien[s]”,49 nor does he pay attention to the fact that the narrative works of Robbe-Grillet and other Minuit authors of the 1950s and ’60s (Nouveau Roman novels) currently represent a very important stage – say, the experimental summit – of the historical development of the (French) novelistic genre. It should be noted that the Nouveau Roman has had a great impact on the development of the novelistic genre (such as on today’s Nouveau Nouveau Roman, see section 6.3). While Prince seeks to exclude certain texts from the realm of narrative, other approaches, such as those of Fludernik50 and Richardson,51 argue that narratology should seek to cover the whole range of narratives, from the most ancient to the most modern, experimental or antimimetic ones. What is the source of these disagreements on the narrative corpus? They spring (or result)52 from different conceptions of narrativity. For Prince (2003), for instance, eventfulness (and its cohesive representation) is the decisive criterion for narrativity:

49 I borrow this term from Sternberg (2010, 612). 50 Fludernik highlights the inclusive nature of her approach: “In contrast to the ‘classic’ narratologies of Bal, Chatman, Genette, Prince or Stanzel, this model sets out to discuss narrativity, not from the vantage point of the realist and Modernist novel or short story, but from the perspective of those types which have hitherto attracted comparatively little sustained analysis: oral and pseudo-oral types of storytelling, including conversational narrative and oral history; historical writing; early forms of written narrative (the medieval verse epic, medieval histories and saints’ lives, storytelling in early letters from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, narratives of the Elizabethan age up to Aphra Behn); and, at the other end of the spectrum, postmodernist literature” (Fludernik 1996, ix). 51 Richardson calls “for an expanded model for the study of narrative that includes both mimetic and antimimetic texts” (2015, xvi). 52 Indeed, it is in many cases hardly possible to say what came first: a conception of narrativity, which has led to the choice of a certain corpus, or a corpus, which has led to a certain concept of narrativity. In any case, one should notice the danger of circular argumentation according to which a specific model of narrativity leads to the choice of a corresponding corpus, which is then argued to prove, inductively, the very notion of narrativity, which has actually determined the whole process. The great merit of openly inductive approaches, such as Propp’s (1968), consists of the avoidance of such backhanded proceedings.

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For an entity to be narrative, it must be analyzable as the representation of one (or more than one non-randomly connected, non-simultaneous, and non-contradictory) transformation of one (or more than one) state of affairs, one (or more than one) event which is not logically presupposed by the transformated state and/or does not logically entail its transform. (Prince 2003, 5–6)

For Fludernik, by contrast, it is experientiality: “Unlike the traditionalist models of narratology, narrativity [. . .] is here constituted by what I call experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’” (1996, 12). Since her experientiality “correlates with the evocation of consciousness”, Fludernik argues, unlike Prince, that “there can [. . .] be narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level” (1996, 13). Richardson (2015, 36–37), for his part, criticises such an “anthropomorphic bias” (Fludernik 1996, 13) in narratology, because it excludes “the other ‘Great Tradition’ [. . .] ignored or marginalized by histories, criticism and theories”, namely that of “antimimetic narratives”, which systematically break narrative illusion (see Richardson 2015, 8, 93) and its anthropomorphic categories (36–37). But where do the differences in the definitions of narrativity come from? What is the source of the normative primacy of specific narrative dimensions (such as plot, experientiality and antimimesis)? Although the respective researchers put forward a number of arguments intended to provide rational arguments for their positions, their normative proposals cannot avoid indicating an irreducible subjectivity (or perspectivity, see section 1.4). The latter can be traced back to personal parameters, such as individual interests,53 reading experiences (which determine the selection of the corpus and what one finds important in narrative) or literary-theoretical presuppositions.54 All or most of the narrative qualities put forward by different theories can be found in literary

53 Just as the narrativity of a text depends on its contexts, the narratological definitions of narrativity are context-dependent, too. This context is given primarily by the field of research. Researchers are under the pressure of finding a yet unexplored niche. If it cannot be found, such a niche can be created, for instance by isolating, emphasising and magnifying a particular dimension of narrativity, thus transforming it into “the” defining feature of narrative. Jannidis et al. observe a similar dynamics with regard to theories of meaning: “Gerade neuere Theorien profilieren sich des Öfteren damit, dass sie dieselben Komponenten wie ihre Vorgänger einbeziehen, sie aber provokativ anders gewichten, um das Neue des eigenen Standpunkts zu markieren” (Jannidis et al. 2003, 14). 54 Jannidis et al. highlight the role that literary-theoretical assumptions play in professional interpretations: “Wie jeder ‘Normalleser’ vollziehen auch professionelle Leser Schritte der Textverarbeitung, während derer sie sprachlichen Einheiten Bedeutung zuschreiben [. . .]. Bei diesen Bedeutungszuschreibungen handelt es sich [. . .] einerseits um unvermeidliche Abläufe im

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narratives. But what authorises researchers to rank one feature (or a particular combination of features) over the other, making it “the” defining feature(s) of narrative?55 This is the point where the readerly and textual dimensions of the S/U problem coalesce, inasmuch as different narrative corpora (textual dimension) engender different definitions of narrativity (and conversely) according to different, subjective experiences of narrativity (readerly dimension). To put it more simply, narratologists are also readers of narratives; their processing starts, just as that of any reader, under personal dispositions and leads (possibly) to a subjective conglomerate of meaning (if the processing succeeds so far). As a result, their definitions highlight selectively only a few (of all possible) aspects of narrativity, notably at the detriment of others. If narratology does not want to build its Babylonian Tower higher and higher, it should stop engendering more and more of these partial, subjective, somehow arbitrary definitions and start acknowledging the full scope of narrativity, that is, the whole range of narrative factors and possibilities. Fortunately, multifactorial definitions of narrativity are increasingly gaining ground in narratology (see, e.g., Wolf 200356; Ryan 2006; 200757; Herman 2009a58; Caracciolo 2014, 32).59 The creation of an all-encompassing, quasi “holistic” (instead of selective) definition of narrativity requires, firstly, recognising and accepting the S/U problem. Sternberg seems to be almost upset by the fact “that ‘narrative’ hasn’t yet gained a univocal

Prozess des Textverstehens, zum anderen aber auch um Operationen, die von vorausgesetzten literaturtheoretischen Annahmen mitbestimmt werden” (Jannidis et al. 2003, 13). 55 Richardson’s (2015) model is an exception in this regard insofar as he does not claim that narrativity lives exclusively by the anti-mimetic. Instead of proposing one prototypical kind of narrative, such as Fludernik does with “spontaneous forms of storytelling” (1996, 19), Richardson “advocate[s] a dual or oscillating conception of narrative, one mimetic, the other antimimetic” (xvi). I elaborate on this point in section 2.3.2. 56 See my discussion of Wolf (2003), especially in the sections 2.4.8 and 2.5.2. 57 Ryan (2006) presents nine “nested conditions” of narrativity whose “ordering becomes freer toward the bottom of the list, as the conditions shift from semantics to pragmatics” (2006, 193): “(1) Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents. (2) This world must be situated in history and undergo changes of state. (3) The changes of state must be caused b[y] [sic] external events, not by natural evolution (such as aging). (4) Some of the participants in the events must be human or anthropomorphic agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. (5) Some of the events must be purposeful action by these agents, i.e. the agents must be motivated by conflicts and their deeds must be aimed toward the solving of problems. (6) The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure. (7) Some of the events must be non-habitual. (8) The events must objectively happen in the story world. (9) The story must have a point” (2006, 194). 58 See section 2.3.5. 59 See my discussion of Caracciolo (2014) in the sections 2.3.6 and 2.4.8.

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sense (distinctive features) and reference (class membership), which a welldefined concept of narrativity can alone provide” (2010, 508), but he fails to acknowledge the reason of this long-lasting dissent on narrativity, which is inter alia the S/U problem and its feedback loop, which rhizomatically interconnects scholars’ narrative corpora (“class membership”), their divergent conceptions of narrativity (“distinctive features”) and the subjective implications of the narrative experience. Secondly, after having accepted the S/U problem, one needs to find a model that is able to reconcile the universal, specific and subjective dimensions of narrativity. Such a reconciliation is the aim of my pyramidal approach to narrativity (see section 2.4) insofar as it is designed as a virtual universal “space” (or map) of narrative possibilities, which systematically covers the “experiential background” (to use Caracciolo’s term) and subjectivity of the reader, the specific constitution of texts as well as all the possible narrative dynamics of actualisation, which might result from the text-reader interaction. Before I present this model, however, it is necessary to have a closer look at the “inner boundaries” that divide both narrativity and narratology.

2.3 Inner boundaries of narrativity and narratology: Rivalling dimensions Narratives can be analysed according to opposing dimensions that compete for narrativity. Narratologists, insofar as they take sides in this debate, can be said to adhere to warring narratological camps. I do, however, not only seek to lay bare the tensions and oppositions that divide the concept of narrativity and the community of researchers – I also wish to make visible the ways in which these oppositions are linked to each other. According to my argument, narrativity can be understood us a complex network of dimensions, which criss-cross and merge, overlap and diverge at various points. The present chapter focuses on exploring this network by examining both the ways in which narrative dimensions are opposed to each other (arborescent rhizomatic dimension) and the ways in which these oppositions are interconnected (rhizomatic dimension proper).

2.3.1 Story versus discourse One of the most disputed subjects concerns two “levels” of the narrative text, eponymous for Chatman’s (1978) narratological approach: the narrated story (intradiegetic level) and the higher level of narratorial discourse (extradiegetic level), i.e. the level of the narrator. Villeneuve underlines the way in which this

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opposition splits narratology into rivalling camps: “Les narratologues se retrouvent [. . .] répartis sur des plages hétérogènes de la science du récit, rappelant parfaitement cette dichotomie faite depuis les formalistes russes entre le fabula et le sjuzhet” (2004, 11).60 Also Nünning (2003, 246) identifies a split, in structuralist narratology, between “story (oriented) narratology” and “discourse (oriented) narratology”.61 Todorov explains the opposition of story (also called fabula, histoire, récit) and discourse (sjuzhet, discours) as follows62: Au niveau le plus général, l’œuvre littéraire a deux aspects: elle est en même temps une histoire et un discours. Elle est histoire, dans ce sens qu’elle évoque une certaine réalité [. . .]. Mais l’œuvre est en même temps discours [. . .]. A ce niveau, ce ne sont pas les événements rapportés qui comptent, mais la façon dont le narrateur nous les a fait connaître. (Todorov 1966, 126)63

According to this position, story and discourse represent the two basic “levels” of narrative texts. Herman (2009a, 17) relates it to Saussure’s relationship between signifiant (“signifier”) and signifié (“signified”), explaining that “a narrative representation encompasses both (a) the textual or semiotic cues used in the representing medium and (b) the characters, situations, and events (what this book terms the storyworld) represented by those cues” (orig. emphasis). There is, however, a debate that questions the number of textual levels that could or should be distinguished from each other.64 In his overview on this debate, Schmid (2005, 241–244) proposes to distinguish four textual levels of narrative (see section 1.3). A second debate concerns the question of whether story and discourse can be distinguished from each other at all. Ryan, for instance, notes sceptically: Every word in the narrative text contributes to its narrativity. It follows that the distinction story-discourse is fallacious: story is a ‘discourse phenomenon’ [. . .] and cannot be

60 “The narratologists find themselves [. . .] dispersed on heterogeneous shores of the science of narrative, evoking perfectly this dichotomy, established since the Russian formalists, between fabula and sjuzhet” (translation mine). 61 Indeed, according to Nünning, “classical narratology featured two other branches, viz. narrative semantics and rhetorical or pragmatic narratology” (2003, 246). 62 Fabula versus sjuzhet is the terminological pair introduced by Russian Formalism. The distinction between histoire and discours goes back to Emile Benveniste (1966) who uses these notions to distinguish two planes of enunciation. Genette (1966) uses the terms récit and discours. 63 “At the most general level, the literary work has two aspects: it is at the same time a story and a discourse. It is story, in the sense that it evokes a certain reality [. . .] At this level, it is not the events reported which count but the manner in which the narrator makes them known to us” (Todorov 1980, 5). 64 Genette, Bal, García Landa and Stierle, for instance, have proposed different models with three levels (see Schmid 2005, 238–41).

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extracted from the text. This thesis precludes the isolation of a narrative stratum and its opposition to other aspects of meaning. (Ryan 1992, 370)

Mitchell, for his part, recognises the virtuality of the distinction as well, but finds the distinction nonetheless useful: The real power of the story-plot distinction is that it allows us to make sense of our common feeling in narrative that a double time-order is at work, the order of the telling and the order of the told. Our method of making this sense is to reconstruct the two orders as parallel spatial forms which can be compared. Neither of the two orders, strictly speaking, is ‘actual’ in the diachronic reading; what is actual is a complex, probably unnameable, interaction between two distinct patterns in the virtual space-time of narrative. (Mitchell 1980, 552, note 27)

Baroni (2005, 51) equally argues for the distinction of story and discourse with regard to the ontological difference that, in autodiegetic narratives, exists between the narrated self of the story and the narrating self of discourse.65 Fludernik, for her part, “does not entirely reject the story vs. discourse distinction but relegates it to those parameters that depend on a realistic cognization of both the story-world and the narrational act”, namely “the respective frames of a story schema (ACTION, fictional world) and a discourse schema (TELLING)” (Fludernik 1996, 336). For Gibson, the idea of narrative levels is per se “an excellent example of the narratological imaginary” (1996, 216), which his postmodern approach criticises. Whatever side one takes in this debate, one cannot deny that the distinction between story and discourse is overly present in narratology. The reason for this ubiquity probably resides in the usefulness of the distinction; it allows not only to differentiate terminologically between narrative mediation and that which is mediated, but also to conceptualise basic tensions, oppositions and questions that divide narratology into opposed camps. One of these camps is centred around the question: Which of the two levels brings about narrativity: story or discourse? Those researchers who consider the story (i.e. the narrative contents; that which happens in the intradiegetic universe) to bring about narrativity do not agree, however, on what it is that provides the story with narrativity. Prince, for instance, holds that “[t]he hallmark of narrative is assurance. It lives in certainty: this happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened and it was related to that” (1982, 149). For him, “narrative dies from sustained ignorance and indecision” (149). For Schmid (2003), factuality is an important

65 “Je pense que l’on peut affirmer sans risque que, même dans le cas d’un récit conversationnel dans lequel le narrateur relate une anecdote personnelle, le protagoniste du récit représente un état passé du sujet [. . .] qui ne se confond pas avec le locuteur présent, et ces deux plans restent par conséquent toujours clairement distincts” (Baroni 2005, 51).

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factor of narrativity as well: at the core of narrativity is an event, which is defined as a change of state that fulfils certain conditions, the first one of which is factuality.66 Ryan (1991), by contrast, considers the virtual, possible developments of a plot to be a decisive factor of narrativity, more precisely, of the “tellability” of narratives (which “is rooted in conceptual and logical complexity”, Ryan 1991, 156). For her, a story is likely to be judged as more intriguing if the plot triggers the reader to envisage alternate, possible plot developments and “virtual strings of events” (158). The level of story thus covers further theoretical oppositions, such as that between story facticity and story virtuality. Another opposition inherent in the level of story is the question of knowing whether it is the action or the characters/actants of the story that are at the core of narrativity. While some approaches combine the two,67 others are more inclined to the one or the other narrative element. Fludernik, for instance, ranks the consciousness of characters over action, arguing that “the notion of event is [. . .] a singularly fuzzy one and cannot be limited to notions of external agency” (1996, 335). She reconstitutes narrativity “on the lines of experiential rather than actantial parameters” (1996, 329). Wolf, for his part, defends the opposite position and therefore attacks Fludernik’s “attempted” “dissolution of ‘plot’” (Wolf 2004, 84). She [Fludernik, ESW] has done so mainly in order to highlight what she regards as constitutive of narrativity, namely ‘experientiality’, and also in order to be able to include experimental modernist stream-of-consciousness texts in the field of narrative. However, this means turning theoretical hierarchies upside down, since experientiality is the common denominator which narratives share with some non-narrative ‘discourses’, whereas the concatenation of actions or events is, according to a wide consensus, the core of all typical stories. (Wolf 2004, 84, emphasis mine)

Generally, theories of narrativity that are based on narrative time (see e.g. Ricœur 1985; Bres 1994), on eventfulness (e.g. Schmid 2003) or scripts (see Herman 2002, 85–113) can be said to define narrativity in terms of narrative action rather than in terms of narrative actants. Nonetheless, the parameters of time and eventfulness can also be applied to narrative discourse: there is a

66 “The first basic requirement of the event, I propose, is that its associated change of state must be factual, or real (real, that is, in the framework of the fictional world). It follows that changes of state which are wished for, imagined, or dreamed are not events” (Schmid 2003, 24, orig. emphasis). 67 Bruner, for instance, notes: “Narratives are about people acting in a setting, and the happenings that befall them must be relevant to their intentional states while so engaged-to their beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on” (1991, 7). See also Ryan (2006) and Greimas (see section 2.3.4).

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narratorial or discourse time, related in different ways to the time of the plot (see e.g. Genette 1988; Sternberg 1992; 2006; 2010), and there are discursive events (see Audet 2007, 33), which brings us back to the opposition of story and discourse. According to my analysis, the question “Where does narrativity reside: on the level of story or of discourse?” implies indeed three different debates and three different understandings of this opposition, which should be briefly delineated. (i) Mimesis and diegesis. The first opposition concerns the classical discrimination between mimesis and diegesis, which theorises the absence versus presence of the level of (narratorial) discourse, thus opposing the dramatic and the epic genres (see Nünning and Sommer 2008). Are dramas, which lack the level of narratorial mediation, to be considered as “narratives”?68 Do they have narrativity or is the latter limited to texts that have a narrator? Since these questions touch on the “outer” (rather than on the “inner”) boundaries of narrativity, I will address this problem in section 2.4.11. If we restrict our consideration, for the moment, onto narratives that are endowed with a level of narrative discourse, one is confronted with two further debates. These debates do not ask whether narrativity requires discourse, but how story and discourse are related to each other. More precisely, they treat the question of how the level of discourse dominates, impedes, disconventionalises or distorts the representation of content at the level of story. (ii) Narrators and their stories. Genette (1966) understands the opposition of story (récit) and discourse (discours) as an opposition between two types of prose, which differ from each other, as far as I see, in terms of the degree of manifestation of the narrator. Genette builds his reflections on Benveniste’s understanding of récit (narrative) as an objective rendering of past events, characterised linguistically (inter alia) by the use of the third person singular pronoun and the absence of any reference to a narratoras well as on Benveniste’s understanding of discours [discourse] as an enunciation, bound (inter alia) to the use of deictic expressions and the first person singular pronoun (i.e. to the presence of speaker or narrator). Those realist narratives of the nineteenth century whose invisible narrators function as transparent mediums of the narrated story exemplify perfectly the récit. Genette summarises the opposition between discours and récit as follows:

68 Nünning and Sommer (2008) answer this question in the affirmative, arguing for a transgeneric narratology of drama. See also Jahn (2001), Nünning and Sommer (2011), Claycomb (2013), Martens and Elshout (2014).

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Dans le discours, quelqu’un parle, et sa situation dans l’acte même de parler est le foyer des significations les plus importantes; dans le récit, comme Benveniste le dit avec force, personne ne parle, en ce sens qu’à aucun moment nous n’avons à nous demander qui parle (où et quand, etc.) pour recevoir intégralement la signification du texte. (Genette 1966, 161, orig. emphasis)69

More broadly speaking, the narrator can either vanish behind the story s/he tells, making the diegetic events the focal point of his narration, or s/he can push her-/himself into the foreground, e.g. by metanarrative comments or reflections, thereby making her/his presence felt (“at the cost” of the story, so to speak). Prince’s claim (or requirement) according to which “narrative is the recounting of events rather than the discussion of their representation” (1982, 146) reveals that his concept of narrativity adopts party for the story and against discourse.70 The narrator should represent the story, considered as the core of narrativity, and not distract attention away from it by talking about him- or herself. Wolf’s (1993) study on the creation versus break of aesthetic illusion in English literature,71 by contrast, gives much space to the anti–illusionist effects brought about by a narratorial discourse that pushes itself into the foreground or breaks further laws of narrative convention (e.g. by meta-narration, extensive descriptions or intrusions into the story). His theoretical focus rehabilitates narrators who refuse to submit themselves to the story insofar as he examines foregrounded narratorial discourse as a narrative phenomenon in its own right, which has specific, describable functions and effects. (iii) Discourse structures and their story. The third opposition equally illuminates the relationship between the levels of story and discourse, but it conceptualises the level of discourse, by tendency, less in terms of a (human and more or less manifest) narrator or narratorial voice than in terms of discursive, structural, especially temporal properties. Narratological attacks on the anthropomorphism of the discourse concepts of “narrator” or “voice” and the proposal of less (or non-)anthropomorphic concepts (e.g. Richardson’s posthuman,

69 “In discourse, someone speaks and his situation in the very act of speaking is the focus of the most important significations. In narrative, as Benveniste insists, no one speaks, in the sense that at no moment do we have to ask ourselves ‘Who is speaking?’ ‘Where?’ ‘When?’ etc. in order to receive fully the meaning of the text” (Genette 1976, 10). 70 For Prince, “[t]he narrativity of a text depends on the extent to which that text fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholes, involving some sort of conflict, made up of discrete, specific and positive events, and meaningful in terms of a human project and a humanized universe” (1982, 160). 71 See section 2.3.6.

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unnatural narration72) belong here, but also all those approaches that theorise the double sequentiality of story and discourse, be it in terms of a chronological parallelism of the sequences of story and discourse (e.g. Labov 1972), of forms of discordance between these two time-lines (see e.g. Genette’s [1972] “analepses”, “prolepses”, etc.; see also Baroni 2009, 20) or in terms of their functional interrelations (Sternberg 1992; 2006; 2010). Concerning discordances between story time and discourse time, Sternberg (1992, 498) attacks Genette – more precisely, Genette’s analytic list of anachronic structures of discourse – for practicing an “atomistic narratology”. According to Sternberg, Genette classifies ways in which narrative discourse deviates from a “hypothetical,73 inartistic,74 unchanging zero-degree” (1992, 494) chronology and leaves out any consideration of the functions and effects of these forms. As a consequence, Genette’s analysis must tear the discourse into pieces: an analepsis here, a prolepsis there, now an ellipsis, now a heterodiegesis, with nothing in the spirit of taxonomy to bridge, motivate, or interlink them.75 No principle of coherence runs through the bits and pieces of disorder themselves [. . .]. (Sternberg 1992, 498)

For Sternberg, narrativity cannot be identified with any surface form,76 neither with an ordered nor with a disordered discourse sequence, but only with the functional effects produced by the interplay of the sequentialities of discourse and story. Sternberg can thus be said to argue in principle against the rivalry between story and discourse and for an analysis of their functional “interplay between times” (1992, 519). Other scholars share this view (see, e.g., Bres 1994,

72 See Richardson (2015, 34). 73 Sternberg’s devaluation of the chronological default order with which Genette contrasts forms of temporal disorder can be criticised with regard to Bres (1994): Sternberg fails to acknowledge that (at least mimetic) narratives posit the “ascendance of time” as the zero-degree order of the narrative (see Bres 1994, 136). Genette’s proceeding thus seems much less arbitrary than Sternberg suggests. 74 Sternberg’s criticism aims at “a poetics of disharmony”, which he ascribes to the formalist and structuralist conviction that “literature deviates from ordinary discourse and literary narrative from chronology – if only to establish and advertise their literariness (poeticity, artistic status) by way of contrast” (2006, 134). 75 The same reproach could be addressed also to taxonomies of narrativity insofar as they do not answer what happens between the different classes of narrative dimensions and definitions. 76 It is, in Sternberg’s eyes, a mistake “to reify (freeze, privilege) any set of means, such as the form of complex plot” (1992, 485). Instead, surface forms of discourse, however twisted or ordered they are in comparison with the story structure, should instead be analysed in terms of their particular functions.

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129, Baroni 2005, 52). His position contrasts sharply with approaches that conceive of narrativity primarily in terms of narrative content on the level of story (e.g. Prince 1982; Ryan 1991; 2006; 2007; Herman 2002, 2013a; Fludernik 199677). The question that poses itself in view of this debate is to know what is at the core of this rivalry of story and discourse. In order to answer this question, I would like to make a little detour, turning back to Genette (1966) who mitigates the opposition between récit and discours in two regards. On the one hand, the boundary seems to have a theoretical (virtual) rather than a practical (actual) literary reality, since in most narrative texts, récit and discours are somehow intertwined. From lengthy discursive digressions of the narrator (such as, for instance, in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste) to the use of a slightly judgmental adjective or an explicative conjunction in an otherwise transparent narration, the level of narrative discourse manifests itself in almost all narratives. On the other hand, for Genette, the opposition of récit and discours is asymmetrical: Le récit inséré dans le discours se transforme en élément de discours, le discours inséré dans le récit reste discours et forme une sorte de kyste très facile à reconnaître et à localiser. La pureté du récit, dirait-on, est plus facile à préserver que celle du discours. [. . .] Le discours peut ‘raconter’ sans cesser d’être discours, le récit ne peut ‘discourir’ sans sortir de lui-même. (Genette 1966, 161–162, emphasis mine)78

For Genette, this asymmetry derives from the fact that “discourse [. . .] is the natural mode of language, the broadest and most universal mode, by definition open to all forms”, while “narrative is a particular mode, marked and defined by a certain number of exclusions and restrictive conditions (no present tense, no first person, etc.)” (1976, 11). The consequence of this asymmetry are “delicate relationships” between “the demands of narrative and the necessities of discourse”, which have brought about an impressive, literary-historical variety of narrative forms (e.g., first-person narratives, epistolary novels or interior monologues, see Genette 1966, 162; 1976, 11). Recent narratological research has conducted extensive research on further narratorial forms and parameters, which exemplify such “delicate relationships” between story and narratorial

77 I am including Fludernik (1996) into this list because experientiality is indeed a contentrather than a form-related concept. See my discussion of Fludernik below, especially in the sections 2.3.4 and 2.3.6. 78 “Narrative inserted into discourse transforms itself into an element of discourse, but discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse and forms a sort of cyst, easily recognized and localized. One might say that the purity of narrative is more obvious than that of discourse. [. . .] Discourse can ‘narrate’ without ceasing to be discourse. Narrative can’t ‘discourse’ without betraying itself” (Genette 1976, 10–11, emphasis mine).

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discourse (e.g. restricted79 versus unreliable80 narration, we- and second person narration,81 multiperson82 narration and denarration83). How does Genette position himself finally toward the rivalry of récit and discours? Genette observes a “contemporary tendency, possibly the reverse of that of L’Etranger and Robbe-Grillet, [. . .] to absorb the narrative into the actual discourse of the writer in the act of writing” (1976, 12). Does Genette thus think that narrativity resides in the récit and risks being deleted by discours? Is discours the enemy of récit, an intruder,84 which risks occupying the latter’s ancestral space? Such a position shines through at the end of his article: Peut-être le récit, dans la singularité négative que l’on vient de lui reconnaître, est-il déjà pour nous, comme l’art pour Hegel, une chose du passé, qu’il faut nous hâter de considérer dans son retrait, avant qu’elle n’ait complètement déserté notre horizon. (Genette 1966, 163)85

But why should discours represent a danger to narrative? What exactly is threatened by narrative discourse? Genette’s answer is unambiguous: it is the function of representation itself that is threatened by narrative discourse. Tout se passe ici [i.e., “ chez un Sollers ou un Thibaudeau”, ESW] comme si la littérature avait épuisé ou débordé les ressources de son mode représentatif, et voulait se replier sur le murmure indéfini de son propre discours. Peut-être le roman, après la poésie, va-t-il sortir définitivement de l’âge de la représentation. (Genette 1966, 163)86

79 See Phelan in Herman et al. (2012, 34). 80 See, e.g., Booth (1961, 158ff.), Martinez and Scheffel (2012, 99–110), Hansen (2007), Phelan (2007), Kindt (2008), Köppe and Kindt (2011), Richardson in Herman et al. (2012, 53); Shen (2014), Nünning (2015). 81 See, e.g., Herman (2002, 331–371); Fludernik (1994; 1996, 336–337, 342; 2011), Richardson (2009). 82 See Richardson (2011, 24). See also Richardson in Herman et al. (2012, 52–53). 83 Richardson describes denarration as a “practice, in which an author affirms certain aspects of a fictional world and then denies them” (see Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 79). 84 The idea of an “intrusion” comes from Genette: “any intrusion of discursive elements into the interior of a narrative is perceived as a disruption of the discipline of the narrative portion” (1976, 10, emphasis mine). 85 “Perhaps narrative, in the negative singularity that we have attributed to it, is, like art for Hegel, already for us a thing of the past which we must hasten to consider as it passes away, before it has completely deserted our horizon” (Genette 1976, 12). 86 “It seems here [i.e. “in a Sollers or a Thibaudeau”, ESW] as if literature has exhausted or overflowed the resources of its representational mode and wants to fall back on the vague murmur of its own discourse. Perhaps the novel, after poetry, will definitively leave the age of representation” (Genette 1976, 12).

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Thus, the boundary between story and discourse overlaps with another boundary, which separates representation from its counterpart: mimesis is opposed to antimimesis. 2.3.2 Mimesis and antimimesis A pertinent reference of the mimesis-antimimesis divide is Ricœur whose definition of narrativity, in Time and Narrative, via mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3 and, respectively, via “emplotment” (mise en intrigue) presupposes that discourse mimetically represents a story in an (at least historically)87 intelligible manner, in the form of a holistic, temporal configuration.88 Interestingly, both Genette (1966) and Ricœur present the historical developments of fictional narratives, that is, the “metamorphoses of the plot” (see Ricœur 1985, 7–28) as a threat to representative, mimetic narrativity. Genette conceives of this threat as a question of quantity, as an impending expansion of antimimetic discours at the cost of mimetic récit. Ricœur, by contrast, understands this threat not in terms of quantity, but of quality. The question that torments him is to know whether new forms of discourse, which refuse to “represent” at all by means of configuration (i.e., to organise experience into temporal wholes), represent “an end to the art of narration” (1985, 8). He wants to know what saves the récit from its decline if contemporary authors conceive of reality as chaotic, contingent and ever incomplete, and if they express this conception of reality by a discourse that has the same characteristics. But is the threat of an impending “death” or “decline” of narrative, as identified by Ricœur, really a threat to narrativity? It seems to me that the threat identified by Ricœur is primarily the result of Ricœur’s relatively narrow definition of narrative via “emplotment” (i.e. the mimetic representation of story in the form of a temporal configuration). For Ricœur, arguing against the decline of narrative amounts to saving his own, relatively restrictive definition of narrative, based on

87 For Ricœur, narrative intelligibility is historical inasmuch as it is historical development and the necessity to innovate established literary forms that prevent new narrative forms from unintelligibility: “innovation has always been the reply to sedimentation” (1985, 25). 88 Ricœur defines plot, “on the most formal level, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents, in other words, that transforms this variety into a unified and complete story. This formal definition opens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plots so long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results” (Ricœur 1985, 8, orig. emphasis).

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mimesis and a syntagmatic temporal order; it also amounts to finding evidence in favour of narrative orderliness and closure (against antimimetic, chaotic and disclosed forms of narrative discourse). Ricœur finds two sources of order, which are argued to save narratives from their “death”.89 The first source is the reader’s expectation of (or will to) coherence: [. . .] c’est bien là [dans les attentes du lecteur, ESW] que le paradigme de consonance prend refuge, parce que c’est là qu’il prend origine. Ce qui paraît indépassable, en dernière instance, c’est l’attente du lecteur que quelque consonance finalement prévale. [. . .] Pour que l’œuvre capte encore l’intérêt du lecteur, il faut que la dissolution de l’intrigue soit comprise comme un signal adressé au lecteur de co-opérer [sic] à l’œuvre, de faire lui-même l’intrigue. [. . .] La frustration ne peut être le dernier mot. Encore faut-il que le travail de composition par le lecteur ne soit pas rendu impossible. (Ricœur 1984, 42–43)90

In order to save his definition of narrativity via concordance, Ricœur performs here, from a systematic point of view, a methodological shift. Initially, the discussion on the impending “death” of narrative was located in the textual system, namely in the representational relationship between the two textual levels of story and discourse.91 Since he could not find a guarantee for concordance in the text,92 Ricœur then reaches out to the reader and her/his “expectations”, searching outside of the text for the concordance he claims. While I agree with Ricœur’s assumption that the reader is in search of coherence,93 I cannot join Ricœur as he posits that the reader’s search for “concordance” should not be frustrated, and that narrative texts should enable the

89 As Ricœur explains, “one may always refuse the possibility of coherent discourse. [. . .] Applied to the sphere of narrative, this refusal signifies the death of every narrative paradigm, the death of narrative” (Ricœur 1985, 28). 90 “Here [in the reader’s expectations, ESW] is where the paradigm of consonance takes refuge because here is where it originates. What seems unsurpassable in the last analysis is the reader’s expectation that some form of consonance will finally prevail. [. . .] If the work is to capture our interest as readers, the dissolution of the plot has to be understood as a signal to us to cooperate with the work, to shape the plot ourselves. [. . .] Frustration cannot be the last word. The reader’s work of composition cannot be made completely impossible” (Ricœur 1985, 24–25). 91 The context was taken into consideration as well insofar as Ricœur considered new forms of discourse to be caused, in the process of literary production, by new conceptions of reality. 92 Ricœur admits this problem explicitly: “La question [de la fin imminente, proposée par Kermode, ESW] conduit toute l’analyse à un point de perplexité. Ce point sera indépassable, si l’on considérait seulement la forme de l’œuvre et si l’on négligeait les attentes du lecteur” (Ricœur 1984, 42, orig. emphasis). 93 In my pyramidal model of narrativity (see below), the reader’s search for concordance, that is, for a narrative gestalt and meaning, is represented by the Pyramid’s vertical orientation towards the pyramidal summit.

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creation of a coherent plot, and that for four reasons. Firstly, this would be a normative and not a descriptive statement (and I do not want to develop a normative, but a descriptive model of narrativity). Secondly, Ricœur illegitimately justifies (his assumption of) a formal textual property (“plot” as a configuration) by outer-textual factors. Thirdly, as soon as one defines coherence in terms of reader processes, one has to include differences between readers and readings. If one takes these differences into account, one has to assume that reader processes can, but do not necessarily have to, be successful in “shaping the plot” themselves. Fourthly, I think that the search for coherence, which does not imply per se any success, is at least as central to narrativity as its result (as I will argue in section 2.4 as well as in Part B of the present study). The second source of order, which Ricœur proposes, is “discourse and communication”, more precisely “the universal pragmatics of discourse” according to which “[i]ntelligibility always precedes itself and justifies itself” (1985, 28).94 Ricœur alludes here to a Gricean conception of communication. If we communicate, we presuppose that the utterance of the speaker is designed to be understood. For Ricœur, the same presupposition applies to narrative texts. Readers are entitled to presuppose that the narrative can be made coherent and thus understood. What Ricœur presents as an argument is, however, not only (again) a normative statement, but it also touches on a highly disputed literarytheoretical subject, namely the question of whether literary language and communication deviate, somehow, from other (“default” or “standard”) forms of communication.95 If Ricœur invokes “the universal pragmatics of discourse” in order to explain literary narrative discourse, he takes sides in a literarytheoretical debate on the existence of a “literary language”, which is indeed far from being decided. For him,96 literary art is “an imitation of the non-literary uses of language”, including “narrative as a means to arrange systematically what happens in life” (Ricœur 1985, 22, emphasis mine). But how can one explain that some of the most valued texts in world literature are extremely difficult and challenge our communicative-receptive capacities? Is it possible that 94 According to Ricœur, “we must have confidence in the powerful institution of language” (1985, 22). 95 Bres (1994, 175) observes justifiably that narratives systematically violate communicative principles: “Le récit transgresse la règle du ‘soyez bref’. Il en est pardonné, pourvu qu’il soit digne d’intérêt”. See also my discussion of Jannidis (2004) and Spoerhase (2007) in section 6.4. 96 Fludernik tends to homogenise literary and non-literary narrativity as well inasmuch as she explicitly launches the project of “bring[ing] together [. . .] oral storytelling – and the most egregiously playful experimental texts into one project of narratological analysis, illustrating that narrative even of widely disparate form reposes on the same definable core of narrativity” (1996, 52).

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narrative literature has not only – or not always – the function of representation, but rather that of challenging and enhancing our cognitive capacities? Herman insinuates this, drawing on the “intelligence-enhancing functions of narrative” (2013b, 227), and also Dancygier alludes to such a function: As long as a reader is prepared to do what she does in colloquial contexts, that is, read out of a text but also read into it, the most difficult narratives can be read and coherently interpreted. With this assumption, fragmented and ostensibly incoherent stories are indeed ultimate exercises in language use, because they stretch the cognitive abilities of ‘making sense’ to their limits. (Dancygier 2012b, 11)

But where are these “limits” of our cognitive abilities? And do narratives really always respect them? If the cognitive abilities of readers are different – due to individual dispositions –, how can we be sure that narrative texts do not challenge some readers beyond the limits of their sense-making abilities? Furthermore, it is very well possible that narratives “stretch” our “cognitive abilities”, even if we ultimately do not succeed in creating a coherent overall gestalt. Ricœur does not provide any argument that would support his claim that a full, coherent understanding can always be achieved. Instead, he claims that intelligibility, as a norm, “justifies itself” (1985, 28) or “brings its own justification” (22). This claim is highly disputable with regard to literariness, even if one rejects the idea of a “literary” language: it is a well-known fact that the degree of literary value correlates largely with the degree of difficulty presented by a literary text,97 and difficulty often means the text’s “resistance”98 against closure, intelligibility and coherent interpretation. One could defend Ricœur’s approach, at this point, by invoking his separation of mimesis2 and mimesis3. While the former presents “the formal principle of narrative configuration”, namely “emplotment” as a “temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous” (1985, 158), it is only the latter – temporal refiguration – that is concerned with “meaning in the full sense of the term, at the intersection of the world projected by the text and the life-world of the reader” (1985, 160). Accordingly, Ricœur affirms in his analysis of mimesis2, in the second volume of Time and Narrative, that “the boundary between configuration and refiguration has not yet been crossed” (160). I doubt, however, whether this is correct,99 97 “Die lectio difficilior ist traditionell die präferierte Umgangsweise mit Literatur in der Sicht professioneller Leser. Die Rangerhöhung der ‘schwierigen Autoren’ und der verrätselten Texte ist es auch und ebenso wenig neu” (Jannidis et al. 2003, 5). 98 See, for example, Miller (2011) on Kafka’s “resistance to narrative closure” and Stump (2006, 99) on the resistance of Toussaint. 99 Ricœur himself explains that he has “to admit that at this stage the problematic of configuration is open to a very strong attack exerted by the problematic of refiguration – this is so by

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since, in order to maintain his conception of “emplotment” as a “discordant concordance”, Ricœur is obliged to leave the formal, textual level and to draw on readers who “cooperate with the work”, “shape the plot” by themselves and undertake “a work of bringing about order” (1985, 25). There is thus a dialectic between both (i) the text and the reader and (ii) order and disorder. Ricœur seems to recognise this problem somehow: his “discordant concordance” (1985, 4, 5, 20, 157) includes “discordance”, that is, the disorder of certain narrative forms, and thus indicates an awareness of the dialectics of order and disorder. But he does not draw the respective consequence (which would be the dismissal of closure and order as the governing principles of the narrative configuration). By making “discordance” the adjectival attribute of “concordance”, Ricœur places the latter over the former100: order over disorder, a holistic concept of emplotment as closure101 over forms of discourse that intentionally sow chaos and anticlosure – even at the price of excluding too “discordant” narratives from the realm of narrative.102 But can narrativity be reduced to what Ricœur calls a (consistent) “mimesis of action” (1985, 156)? Literary narratives, especially – but not exclusively – those of “high literature”, often seem to live by their incoherencies, by their ability to challenge readers and their capacities to create structure and coherence. They trigger complex processes of coherence and of meaning-making, which by no means must end by a “synthesis of the heterogeneous”. A similar point has been made by Baroni (2009) who distinguishes between two functions of narratives – a “configurational” (fonction configurante)

reason of the general law of language that what we say is governed by that about which we are speaking” (1985, 159–160, orig. emphasis). 100 Baroni has made a similar observation: “l’équilibre de la position ricœurienne peut sembler assez difficile à maintenir et elle débouche en fait sur une hiérarchisation, sur une inclusion de la discordance dans la concordance, ce qui revient à trahir le temps” (2009, 16, orig. emphasis). 101 Ricœur explicitly invokes the “criterion of unity and completeness” (1985, 20), explaining that “an action is whole and complete if it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; that is, if the beginning introduces the middle, if the middle [. . .] leads to the end, and if the end concludes the middle. Then the configuration wins out over the episodic form, concordance overcomes discordance. Hence, it is legitimate to take as a symptom of the end of the paradigmatic tradition of emplotment the abandonment of the criterion of completeness and therefore the deliberate choice not to end a work” (1985, 20). Insofar as Kafka, for example, has probably deliberately chosen not to end Das Schloss (see chapter 5), Ricœur would have to consider it as a non-emplotted – and thus non-narrative – work. 102 “I am in agreement with Barbara Herrnstein Smith when she says that ‘anticlosure’ reaches a threshold beyond which we are confronted with an alternative: either exclude the work from the domain of art or give up the most basic presupposition of poetry, that it is an imitation of the non-literary uses of language [. . .]. In my opinion we must choose the first alternative” (Ricœur 1985, 22).

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and an “intriguing” function (fonction intrigante, 2009, 16) – and defends a poetics of narrative discordance (see 20), i.e., a poetics that explores the ways in which the unfinished, living story (i.e., the story that the reader is about to read) creates suspense due to its incomplete schema or “discordance”. One reservation has to be made, however, against my presentation of Ricœur. His position is not as clearly “mimetic” as one might think, because of the elasticity of the notion of mimesis. In view of antimimetic tendencies in narrative literature, Ricœur seeks to preserve his mimetic definition of narrativity by expanding the notion of mimesis such that the latter comprises even those “metamorphoses of the plot” that present “the most audacious blows to our paradigmatic expectations” (1985, 25). The initial idea of mimesis, understood as the representation of an action that is whole and complete, is thus stretched by Ricœur so far that it is finally able to cover faintly representational, quite disordered narrative forms (as long as they are comprehensible as an innovative reply to older narrative forms – and a “leap beyond every paradigmatic expectation is impossible” for Ricœur, see 1985, 25). It is not clear where the limits of such an expanded concept of mimesis are. Nonetheless, they fall clearly within a domain that Richardson (2006; 2015), for instance, already calls “antimimetic”. Instead of expanding the notion of mimesis until it covers every possible instantiation, Richardson draws a boundary between mimesis and antimimesis: [. . .] what I call mimetic narratives are these works of fiction that model themselves on or substantially resemble nonfictional works. Mimetic narratives systematically attempt to depict the world of our experience in a recognizable manner; this is the traditional goal of works that strive for realism or verisimilitude. Nineteenth-century realist fiction is a major subspecies of the mimetic tradition. I define an unnatural narrative as one that contains significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames. By antimimetic, I mean representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres. Paradigmatic examples of unnatural narratives include Borges’s most unrealistic stories, Beckett’s The Unnameable (1953), Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957), Anna Kacvan’s Ice (1967), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). (Richardson 2015, 3–4)

Richardson’s distinction between mimetic and antimimetic (unnatural) narratives is both literary-historical and systematic. It is literary-historical insofar as he considers mimetic narratives to find their purest expression in nineteenthcentury realist fiction103; but it is also systematic insofar as Richardson considers

103 This prototypical definition of mimetic narratives via realist fiction is thus highly congruent with Genette’s (1966) understanding of a prototypical récit (see the last subchapter).

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antimimetic properties to be a transhistorical phenomenon,104 which lives by the “intentional transgression of conventional mimetic or nonmimetic conventions” (2015, 5, orig. emphasis), independent of any particular literary movement or epoch. In a nutshell, both Ricœur and Richardson are concerned with the way new literary forms call into question the traditional function of mimesis, but they react differently to these developments. Ricœur conceptualises extremely deviant narrative forms as the threatening Other of narrative, which can only be defeated by its incorporation into mimesis (the notion of mimesis thereby becoming totally inflated).105 Richardson, by contrast, proposes to make a systematic distinction between texts that serve and texts that battle the principle of mimesis, considering them as two “great” literary-historical traditions: one conventionalist and directed towards the mimesis of “real-life experience” (2015, 5), the other anticonventionalist106 by its defiance of “the conventions of mimetic (or realist) representation” (4). In my opinion, the pertinence of Richardson’s approach consists of the fact that he seeks neither to exclude any kind of narrativity nor to rank one over the other. His focus on antimimetic, unnatural texts follows from the observation of a sustained neglect of antimimetic phenomena in narratology. In other words, his “quarrel with mimetic accounts is not about their existence, but their limitations” (2015, xvii). Insofar as he “strongly advocate[s] a dual or oscillating conception of narrative” (xvi),107 Richardson’s theory covers the entire continuum of narrativity, which extends between the two poles of mimesis and antimimesis.108

104 According to Richardson, “antimimetic scenes and works can be found in most periods of literary history, ranging from ancient Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit texts through medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century narrative on to recent postmodern, magical realist, and avant-garde works” (2015, 5). 105 Ricœur’s proceeding can be read in terms of Lotman’s (2001) theory of semiospheres. According to this reading, the mimetic code represents Ricœur’s semiosphere, which is confronted with the foreign semiosphere of antimimesis. Ricœur’s reflections on that topic – his attempts to save mimetic narrative from the foreign code – can be read as an interaction of the two semiospheres, which results in a “swalling” of the mimetic semiosphere (i.e., the mimetic code). 106 “In short, insofar as a work is conventional, it is not unnatural” (Richardson 2015, 11). 107 There is, however, no transgression of convention without convention. Accordingly, antimimetic narratives contain almost necessarily a certain amount of mimetic features: “unnatural elements function best in a literary context when framed by, combined with, or in a dialectical relation with other mimetic or conventional elements of narrative” (Richardson 2015, 20–21). 108 Richardson’s systematic distinction between conventionalist (mimetic) and disconventionalist (antimimetic) narrativities overlaps with Lotman’s distinction of “stylistic” and “rhetorical” epochs. See Lotman (2001, Ch. 3).

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As especially the discussion of Ricœur’s approach has shown, the opposition of mimesis and antimimesis is related to another opposition of narrative dimensions, which represents perhaps the most important boundary of narrativity, namely that of the text versus the reader. If narratives are defined via the mimetic representation of temporal wholes, narrativity seems to be located primarily in the text; but if narratives refuse to mimetically represent a story and challenge the reader’s expectations and capacities by antimimetic strategies, narrativity seems to be bound rather to the interpretative activities of the reader.

2.3.3 Text versus reader At first sight, the text-reader opposition seems to have historical implications since, according to one of the most prominent “stories” told again and again in narratology, formalist and structuralist approaches reduce narrativity to a textual property while the narratologies of today, including especially cognitive narratology, also take readerly cognition (as well as contexts) into consideration.109 The “postclassical” approach may well be illustrated by Herman’s theory according to which “narrative can be viewed under several profiles simultaneously – as a form of mental representation, a type of textual or semiotic artifact, and a resource for communicative interaction” (2009a, 2).110 Although the historical dimension is surely important, it should be treated with caution for two reasons. On the one hand, the opposition between text and reader is not exclusively a historical phenomenon, but marks an important systematic threshold, which is still valid for the narratology of today; as far as I see, postclassical narratology has not “overcome” this opposition since narratology is still in search of the place where narrativity essentially originates.111 On the other hand, structuralist approaches do partly draw on outertextual aspects, and even on cognition.

109 According to Ibsch, for example, structuralists generally assume “that the elements of a textual system are ‘given’, needing only to be ‘discovered’ and described, instead of ‘constructed’ by specific cognitive operations” (1990, 412). According to Nünning, who gives an overview of the difference between structuralist narratology and postclassical narratologies, the “main object of study” of structuralist narratology are “‘features,’ ‘properties’ of a text” while that of the “new narratologies” are “the dynamics of the reading process” (2003, 243). 110 By introducing the idea of such diverse narrative “profiles”, Herman allows for the integration of diverse (namely text-, cognition- and interaction-based) conceptions of narrative into his theory. As Herman puts it, “stories are cognitive as well as textual in nature, structures of mind as well as constellations of verbal, cinematic, pictorial, or other signs produced and interpreted within particular communicative settings” (Herman 2009a, 8). 111 See my analysis of Fludernik (1996) in sections 2.3.4 and 2.3.6.

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Propp, for instance, is traditionally seen as searching for the narrativity of folk tales in their textual gestalt. This is true to the extent to which Propp, who is convinced that “fairy tales possess a quite particular structure” (1968, 6), undertakes to “brea[k] the tale into its components” (15) and comes to the conclusions that “[a]ll fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure” (23, orig. emphasis deleted). For Propp, all fairy tales are governed by a scheme of (maximally) thirty-one sequential functions. Nonetheless, at the end of his study, Propp goes one important step further, as he brings up the question of what this scheme of thirty-one functions, which he has laid open with so much analytical effort, actually represents. What is the nature or meaning of this schema? What does it stand for? Does it represent an “archetype” (89) of the fairy tale? If so, what is the source of this “archetype”? Interestingly, this question leads Propp away from the text: ‘A single source’ does not positively signify, as some assume, that all tales came, for example, from India, and that they spread from there through the entire world, assuming various forms in the process of their migration. The single source may also be a psychological one. (Propp 1968, 106, emphasis mine)

If, as Propp suggests, the scheme that gives birth to all folk tales originates in the human psyche, then Propp locates narrativity not in the text, but in cognition, the text being nothing but an indicator of a basic mental narrative structure. Also Prince’s (1982) definition of narrativity takes the importance of cognition into consideration, but (unlike Propp) not the cognition of the producers of narratives, but rather the cognition of the receiver: “Narrativity depends on the receiver and so does its value” (1982, 160). Admittedly, Prince’s definition is text-based insofar as he enumerates narrative features whose presence in the text allows readers, in his eyes, to ascribe narrativity to them (namely closure, eventfulness, meaningfulness). While one can discuss and disagree about what it is that readers search for in the text,112 one does not do justice to Prince’s “classical” definition if one reduces it to an exclusively text-based approach since, for Prince, narrativity depends indeed on the process of reading: “In general, when we read a text as a narrative, we try and process it as a series of assertions about events the occurrence of which is not in doubt” (1982, 150, emphasis mine). Insofar as Prince contends that narrativity means that “we read a text as a narrative”, his approach is quite similar to the “postclassical” approach of

112 In my view, Prince’s (1982, 150) requirements are not of universal validity; they have to be counterbalanced by the inclusion of the opposed narrative features: narratives can also resist closure, eventfulness and meaningfulness.

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Fludernik, especially her idea of narrativisation, even though she goes admittedly much further by examining in detail “the reading process and the reading experience [. . .] in relation to readers’ cognitive reliance on [. . .] embodied schemata and parameters” (Fludernik 1996, 19). The narratological opposition between text and cognition is thus indeed a continuum rather than a categorical distinction insofar as theories focus more or less either on text or on cognition. Bremond’s (1966) concept of récit113 appears at first sight to be very textbased and representationalist: “Tout récit consiste en un discours intégrant une succession d’événements d’intérêt humain dans l’unité d’une même action” (1966, 62).114 Fludernik has pointed out that Bremond’s model, which is based on the branching alternatives of the “elementary sequence”, takes microtextual dynamics of plot into consideration “in which reader expectations are apt to be upset at each and every turn” (Fludernik 1996, 21). At this point, however, Fludernik passes beyond Bremond’s model insofar as the latter contains no considerations of the reader and his/her perspective. Bremond’s approach is oriented towards the perspective (the possibilities and choices) of the narrator.115 Interestingly, at the end of his analysis, Bremond addresses, just like Propp, the question of what may be the source of “the simplest forms of narrativity” (that is, of the elementary sequence), which he has isolated by textual analysis. He presumes two sources of narrativity, which he presents as closely interconnected: (i) “des conduites humaines agies ou subies” (1966, 76) (“human behavior patterns acted out or undergone”, 1980, 406) and (ii) the human mind: Quand l’homme, dans l’expérience réelle, combine un plan, explore en imagination les développements possibles d’une situation, réfléchit sur la marche de l’action engagée, se remémore les phases de l’événement passé, il se raconte les premiers récits que nous puissions concevoir. (Bremond 1966, 76)116

113 See section 2.4.2. 114 “All narrative consists of a discourse which integrates a sequence of events of human interest into the unity of a single plot” (Bremond 1980, 390). 115 “L’enchaînement des fonctions dans la séquence élémentaire, puis des séquences élémentaires dans la séquence complexe est à la fois libre (car le narrateur doit à chaque instant choisir la suite de son récit) et contrôlé (car le narrateur n’a le choix, après chaque option, qu’entre les deux termes [. . .] d’une alternative)” (Bremond 1966, 76, emphasis mine). 116 “When man, in real life, maps out a plan, explores in his mind the possible developments of a situation, reflects on the course of action undertaken, remembers the phases of a past event, he forms the first narrations of which we can conceive” (Bremond 1980, 406).

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Bremond thus develops, in nuce, an anthropological117-cognitivist conception of narrativity, which prefigures later, “postclassical” approaches, such as that of Bruner, who equally contends that “narrative organizes the structure of human experience” (1991, 21), or such as that of Fludernik (1996; see her first level of cognitive parameters).118 An approach that is equally interesting with regard to the opposition between text and reader is Wolf’s (2003) transmedial approach, which is very innovative and therefore worth a detailed summary. A great advantage of Wolf’s approach resides in its distinction of the diverse uses of the term “narrative” and in the way in which it explains the difference between the concepts of narrative and narrativity. Wolf conceives of narrativity as the “multifactorial and gradable defining quality of narrative(s)” (2003, 183). He identifies a bundle of “factors” or “basic traits” of narrativity – called ‘narratemes’ – that constitute narrativity as the “defining quality of narratives” (183). While narrativity is a multifactorial quality, narrative – more precisely, narrative I, as Wolf calls it – is, for Wolf, a cognitive macro-frame, which is applied to semiotic objects whenever narrativity becomes predominant. This frame denotes an “approach to factual or imagined reality and a basic way of organizing verbal discourse or other forms of cultural signification” (182). Wolf distinguishes this macro-frame from what he calls narrative(s) II, which denotes a particular story. Narrative II is thus a “media-unspecific realization of the frame narrative in a particular story-substance” (183). Narratemes, narrativity, narrative I and narrative(s) II pertain to the level of (narrative) “constituents”, which Wolf distinguishes from two further levels, namely from “forms of transmission” of narrative(s)/stories and from “concrete results” of this transmission. According to Wolf, three forms of narrative transmission can be distinguished: (i) media able to transmit narrative(s)/stories, such as oral storytelling, fiction, drama, film or painting, (ii) media-specific genres, such as jokes, short fiction or historical painting, and (iii) media-specific discourse modes, such as narrative representation versus descriptive representation, argumentation and the like. The third level of “concrete results”, finally, refers to a third narrative frame, called narrative(s) III.

117 “Although it is a technique of literary analysis, the semiology of narrative draws its very existence and its wealth from its roots in anthropology” (Bremond 1980, 406). 118 Her first level of cognitive parameters draws on the most basic experiential and cognitive level of real-life experience, including agency, goals and the “natural comprehension of observed event processes including their supposed cause-and-effect explanation” (1996, 43). Bremond’s conception of cognitive “universal categories” (1980, 406) applies to action structures (task, contract, error, trap, etc.), i.e. to story contents, and does not include schemata of the level of discourse (which can be found on Fludernik’s third level of cognitive parameters).

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This frame represents “(parts of) concrete narrative works/texts [which are considered] as realizations of the frame narrative (narrative I) and of particular stories (narrative II) through specific media and other forms of transmission” (183, figure 1). The frames narrative I, II and III thus represent, in an ascending order, more and more concrete manifestations of narrativity: narrative I represents approximately the abstract idea of narrativehood; narrative II refers to concrete narrative contents, though they may be transmitted through different media (e.g. through a film versus through a novel); narrative III, finally, denotes the concrete, media-specific transmission of a particular story. I would now like to take a closer look at Wolf’s narratemes, which bring about narrativity as the defining quality of narrative(s). Wolf distinguishes three kinds of “narratemes”: one kind of narratemes (“content elements”) are “classical constituents of [. . .] [the] story/histoire” (2003, 186), which equip the narrative world: characters, action and setting. They include further narratemes: time, change, conflict, at least one character or anthropomorphic experiencer, “the human capability of making choices and resolving conflicts, of acting and reacting in a conscious and deliberate way” (186) and intentionality or desire. A second kind of narratemes concerns discourse and embraces “the discreteness of different phases” of the action (186), specificity or concreteness as well as coherence. Coherence is created by “cohesive devices” (186), which connect elements of the narrative world: chronology, repetition, unity, causality and teleology. A third kind of narratemes (“main narratemes”) is more abstract. These main narratemes – representationality,119 experientiality,120 and a “potential of meaningfulness”121 – emerge out of the interplay between the first two kinds of narratemes and of the way they are interconnected with each other. What is interesting, for the present purposes, is the fact that Wolf’s approach somehow remains ambiguous with regard to the (textual versus readerly) nature of the narratemes. Consider, for instance, the “main narrateme” of experientiality. For Wolf, it denotes simultaneously the experience made by fictive characters – and thus a textual feature –122 and that made by real readers.

119 “Representationality means that narratives create or re-create ‘a world’ which can be deciphered as such by a recipient” (Wolf 2003, 186). 120 Wolf conceives of experientiality as the result of representationality and “refers both to the experience of the ‘characters’ in the narrative world and to the re-experience offered to the recipients of the narrative” (2003, 186). 121 I elaborate on the narrateme “potential of meaningfulness” in sections 2.3.3., 2.4.8 and 2.5.2. 122 If one thinks, however, that the experience that we attribute to characters is in fact an experience that is enacted by readers and only ascribed to characters (which Caracciolo [2014] calls “consciousness-attribution”), then experientiality would not be an example of such an ambiguity.

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I contend that it is the problem of locating the narratemes either in text or in cognition that cues Wolf to speak about a “potential of” (or “a tendency towards”) meaningfulness (instead of speaking simply about “meaning” or “meaningfulness”),123 since, while “meaning” or “meaningfulness” is a highly pragmatic, reader-dependent criterion, the “potential” for such a meaningfulness can be ascribed directly to the text. On the one hand, it is indeed a clever move to anchor the criterion of meaning in the “potential” of the text, since this allows Wolf to evade the problem of readerly subjectivity.124 On the other hand, this ploy introduces an inconsistency into Wolf’s approach since Wolf also defines the frame narrative via “the exploration and often affirmation of a meaning in the flux of experience” (185) – called the “philosophical function” of narrative. The formula “potential of meaningfulness” thus seeks simultaneously to define narrativity pragmatically via its meaning-creating function (“meaningfulness”)125 and to define it, in a mitigated form, textually. Moreover, by assigning a “potential” for meaningfulness to the text, Wolf aims obviously to maintain the criterion of meaning even in those cases in which the creation of meaning fails – in such cases, the potential for meaningfulness can be said to remain unexploited.126

123 See my criticism of this criterion in section 2.4.8. 124 Since not every reader may find the same meaning in the same text (or meaning at all), Wolf cannot define narrativity positively via the presence or creation of “meaning”. Meaning is a deeply pragmatic criterion and thus tends to undermine text-centred, representationalist definitions. 125 The fact that Wolf italicises, in the summary of his approach, the narratemes “experientiality”, “representationality” and “meaningfulness”, but not the supplementary “potential of”, indicates that Wolf does indeed understand meaningfulness as a positive, defining narrateme. 126 A second ambiguity of Wolf’s approach resides in the intra- and simultaneously extradiegetic nature of some narratemes. The narrateme of teleology, for instance, covers both the intradiegetic teleology of the story (such as “the attempt of characters to reach certain goals”) and “a ‘discursive’ kind of teleology”, namely “the trajectory of the text or the artefact as a whole”, including its “tendency to suggest closure” (2003, 187). The discursive kind of teleology, for its part, feeds back onto the reader (and thus interconnects with the text/cognition ambiguity) inasmuch as it is responsible, according to Wolf, for the creation of readerly suspense: “It may be going too far to call suspense, as has been done, ‘consubstantial to narrative itself.’ Yet suspense, in the basic sense of creating expectations [...] and delaying their disappointment or fulfilment [.. .] is a typical effect of narrative teleology and is especially apt to involve the recipient in the narrative world both intellectually and emotionally” (Wolf 2003, 187–188). According to Wolf’s model, it is thus neither possible to categorise narratemes unambiguously either as story features or as discourse features nor to identify them uniquely as either textual features or cognitive features. Instead, narratemes participate in a large network of interdependencies and interconnections that always involve processes of coherence at the text-cognition interface (i.e., narrativity in actualisation).

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Which insight can we gain from these observations on classical and postclassical narrative theories? First of all, narratological approaches cannot be easily “located” with regard to the divide between text and cognition. Their search for the “source” of narrativity often leads to mitigations of initial hypotheses, to ambiguous criteria and/or to a displacement of research foci. This provides the approaches themselves and their narrativities with a shifting, dynamic, ambivalent nature, which crosses the borders of narratological taxonomies without erasing them. Sternberg can serve as a further example. He locates narrativity in the interplay of two textual levels (story and discourse) and repeatedly highlights the fact that his theory is not based on the level of story alone, but that it includes the level of discourse. He focuses on the interplay of the two levels, considered as the “dynamic intersequence relation unique to the narrative genre” (2010, 634, orig. emphasis). But where can this “dynamic relation” reside, if not in the consciousness of the reader?127 Indeed, the key terms of his theory (suspense, curiosity and surprise) leave no doubt that it is the feelings of the receiver and the respective pro- and retrospective cognitive activities that are foregrounded by his concept of narrativity. I would thus argue – against Abbott (2014) – that Sternberg’s approach cannot be assigned to the side of theories of inherency.128 Instead, it hovers between a text-centred approach (relation between 127 Sternberg (2010), however, employs a considerable syntactic subtlety with which he places the readerly activities out of focus: “Intersequence, intertemporality, interdynamics, interprocess: always ‘inter,’ because this generic relation entails not just two sequences (times, dynamics, processes) but a Siamese twinship, whereby narrative/narrativity lives in between, or more exactly yet, in our inescapable restless movement between, [sic] the two, from start to finish” (2010, 635, emphasis mine). Reader activities are syntactically reduced to the italicised noun phrase. 128 Abbott claims that Sternberg’s theory, which he principally ranges under his second class of scalar or intensional approaches, “[. . .] transits to a concept of inherency. Thus ‘strong narrativity [. . .] not merely represents an action but interanimates the three generic forces that play between narrated and narrational time’ (2001, 119)” (Abbott 2014, 594, emphasis mine). Abbott’s thought seems to go as follows: If Sternberg claims that narrativity “interanimates” the three generic forces of suspense, curiosity and surprise, then narrativity is conceptualised as a quality that causes and thus precedes the three readerly activities and emotions; thus, Abbott comes to the conclusion that Sternberg presents narrativity as an inherent quality. But there seems to be a misunderstanding concerning the quote. Consider Sternberg’s original text: “On the one hand, the discourse boasts strong narrativity. It not merely represents an action but interanimates the three generic forces [. . .]” (Sternberg 2001, 119, emphasis mine). The antecedent of “it” is “the discourse” and not “strong narrativity”, such that Abbott’s quotation has to be corrected as follows: “the discourse [. . .] not merely represents an action but interanimates the three generic forces [. . .]” (emphasis mine). This quotation does not support Abbott’s inherency claim any more since, for Sternberg, narrativity is the result of the form-function interplay, i.e. of the “Siamese twinship” of discourse time and diegetic time (see Sternberg 2010, 614), understood in terms of dynamics of reception.

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story and discourse) and a reader-oriented approach (effects of this relationship on the reader; readerly activities and dynamics). Reader-oriented approaches to narrativity, such as Sternberg’s, necessarily bring the dynamic aspects of narrativity into play. This is where the opposition between text and reader touches on another opposition, namely that between dynamics and schemata.

2.3.4 Dynamics versus schemata On the one hand, the dichotomy of narrative dynamics and narrative schemata is prone to illuminating dissent in narratology on the question of whether narrativity (i.e., the very bottom of the Babylonian Tower of narrativity) is a processual quality or dynamics, which emerges during the process of reception, or whether it corresponds to a specific, objectively given and describable combination of narrative dimensions or factors, as can be represented in a narrative schema. Many narratologists would hasten to add that this alternative is primarily a historical one, inasmuch as dynamics of reading and sense-making are much more focused by recent narratology than by classical approaches, which propose more static, “grammatical” models. Here, again, I would be careful with such general claims – on the one hand, because recent research, even outside of narratology, still offers “narrative schemata” and, on the other, because the distinction itself is relative: most narrative schemata include also dynamic or processual components and most outlines of narrative dynamics either rely on static schemata or presuppose them as the necessary result of the narrative dynamics under consideration. Instead of a clear-cut opposition between narrative dynamics and schemata, there is a complex dialectics between the two. Before we take some (more or less dynamic) narrative schemata and (more or less static) narrative dynamics into consideration, two notions of the “narrative schema” should be differentiated in order to avoid misunderstandings. (a) Narrative use of cognitive schemata. According to a first understanding, narrative schemata are general cognitive schemata, which are somehow used to establish narrativity. Schemata are cognitive structures representing generic knowledge, i.e., structures which do not contain information about particular entities, instances, or events, but rather about their general form. Readers use schemata to make sense of events and descriptions by providing default background information of comprehension, as it is rare and often unnecessary for texts to contain all the detail required for them to be fully understood. (Emmott and Alexander 2014, 756)

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Emmott and Alexander are drawing here on general cognitive schemata, stored in the cognition of readers, which allow the gaps left by narratives to be filled. Theorists such as Bruner (1991) or Herman (2002), for example,129 consider such general schemata to play an important role for narrativity; more precisely, they draw on a specific kind of schema, which Schank and Abelson call “scripts”: A script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. A script is made up of slots and requirements about what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. Scripts handle stylized everyday situations. They are not subject to much change, nor do they provide the apparatus for handling totally novel situations. Thus, a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation. [. . .] There are scripts for eating in a restaurant, riding a bus, watching and playing a football game, participating in a birthday party, and so on. These scripts are responsible for filling in the obvious information that has been left out of a story. (Schank and Abelson 1977, 41)

For Bruner (1991), narratives are not entirely script-based, since scripts are too well-known and thus lack the interest (tellability) that arises with unexpected turns, unforeseen by scripts.130 While scripts are static (not from a temporal perspective, but insofar as they represent stored, organised knowledge),131 the breaching of scripts is the dynamic component of Bruner’s narrative principle of “canonicity and breach” according to which familiar structures of knowledge become modified. Herman subscribes to this idea, thus locating narrativity in the “script-story interface” (2002, 93).132 For Herman, “recipients will be inclined to view as stories precisely those sequences in which the outcome is not strictly determined by the initial conditions” (2002, 94); in other words, the story does not develop as predicted by the activated conceptual knowledge (i.e., by the script). Herman argues further that the degree of narrativity depends on two parameters: (i) on the number of scripts that the text (and context) activates,133 and

129 Schemata play a crucial role in Cook’s (1994) approach as well, but his theory is less preoccupied with narrativity than with literariness. 130 “For to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from in a manner to do violence to what Hayden White calls the ‘legitimacy’ of the canonical script” (Bruner 1991, 11). 131 Scripts are often described as “dynamic” because they imply a temporal development (while frames, by contrast, represent facts or situations that do not develop over time). I call them “static” nonetheless in order to highlight the contrast between knowledge, stored as ready-made entities in cognition, and textual structures, which dynamically deviate from these knowledge structures. 132 “[. . .] stories stand in a certain relation to what I know, focusing attention on the unusual and the remarkable against a backdrop made up of highly structured patterns of belief and expectation” (Herman 2002, 90). 133 See Herman (2002, 91, 99).

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(ii) on the degree to which the action structure of the text deviates from scriptbased expectations: All other things being equal, then, the greater the number (and diversity) of the experiential repertoires set into play during the processing of a sequence S, and the more that S nonetheless deviates from or militates against expectations about what was likely to occur or be done, the more narrativity will the processor be likely to ascribe to S. (Herman 2002, 92)

He comes back to this idea in Basic Elements of Narrative in which he identifies four (of the eponymous) “basic elements”, one of them being “some sort of disruption or disequilibrium [introduced] into a storyworld” (Herman 2009a, 105), i.e., “noncanonical events” (17).134 Fludernik’s (1996; 2003) approach, which will be discussed in greater detail below, theorises a narrative use of cognitive schemata as well. Her “natural narratology” is not primarily based on scripts, but on specific narrative schemata, frames and parameters (although she strategically avoids calling them “narrative”).135 Fludernik (1996, 43–46, 278) distinguishes between four levels of cognitive parameters: (i) real-life schemata of action and experience, including cognitive frames of agency, goals, intellection, temporal directedness and the goal-orientedness of acting subjects; (ii) five macro-structural (transcultural) frames of storytelling (TELLING, REFLECTING, VIEWING, EXPERIENCING, ACTING), (iii) culture-specific schemata of storytelling, including generic parameters and narratological concepts; and, finally, (iv) “interpretive abilities by which people link unknown and unfamiliar material with what they are already familiar with, thereby rendering the unfamiliar interpretable and ‘readable’” (1996, 45).

134 His “basic elements of narrative” are “(i) situatedness, (ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/world disruption, and (iv) what it’s like” (2009a, 9) according to which narrative is “(i) a mode of representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling. This mode of representation (ii) focuses on a structured timecourse of particularized events. In addition, the events represented are (iii) such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. The representation also (iv) conveys what it is like to live through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses undergoing the disruptive experience at issue” (Herman 2009a, 9). 135 See section 2.3.6.

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As Fludernik argues, readers provide texts with narrativity by interpreting them as representing human “experientiality”. They do so by applying the abovementioned cognitive frames and parameters to them. Such processes of narrativisation, of “establishing narrativity in the course of the reading process” (1996, 31), are located on the fourth level of her model of conceptual parameters. Concerning the divide between schemata and dynamics, one can say that the schemata and parameters of the first three levels of her model represent static knowledge,136 while the fourth level of her model – the idiosyncratic, processual application of the available schemata – represents the dynamic component of her approach in terms of readerly activities of reception or interpretation. To sum up, if one can speak of “narrative schemata” in approaches such as those of Bruner, Herman or Fludernik, it is in the sense of general, experiencebased cognitive schemata whose default structures of action, experientiality or storytelling are dynamically used (i.e., modified by texts or applied by readers) in order to establish narrativity. (b) Narratological representation of a universal narrative pattern. But the notion of “narrative schema” can also be understood differently – and this is the way I conceive of it in this chapter –, namely as the narratological representation of a universal narrative gestalt or pattern. According to this reading, the notion of “narrative schema” refers to a (more or less visualised) schema of narrative building blocks or elements whose configuration is supposed to represent narrativity. Narrative schemata can have a more or less static versus dynamic shape and their dynamic components can be located on different levels. Firstly, dynamics can be found on the level of the story; this is often the case in structuralist approaches. The simplest schema of this kind is perhaps Todorov’s definition of the minimal plot as the passage from one equilibrium to another: L’intrigue minimale complète consiste dans le passage d’un équilibre à un autre. Un récit idéal commence par une situation stable qu’une force quelconque vient perturber. Il en résulte un état de déséquilibre; par l’action d’une force dirigée en sens inverse, l’équilibre

136 Nonetheless, it should be noted that Fludernik provides the third level of her model of cognitive parameters with a dynamic component insofar as she assumes that an “incorporation of new options into the realm of familiar genres or discourse types” (1996, 34) takes place. Cognitive frames thus get actualised due to new reading experiences or cultural inputs. As a consequence, Fludernik argues that narrativisation constitutes “a processual boundary between the reader and the text, and between the text and its historicization” (1996, 35). This idea is, beyond any doubt, one of the great merits of her approach, since most theories struggle with the difficulty of providing a definition that is capable of covering the historical dynamics of narrative forms.

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est rétabli; le second équilibre est semblable au premier mais les deux ne sont jamais identiques. (Todorov 1971, 121)137

This schema is dynamic insofar as a stable situation undergoes a qualitative change (on the story level); but it is also static insofar as the storied transition from one equilibrium to another, representable as the narrative schema E – DE – E’,138 is static by itself; it represents a fixed structure, which has to be presented by good (“ideal”)139 or highly narrative texts. Propp’s analysis of the thirty-one functions of the fairy tale also combines story-related dynamism and model-related schematism. The basic element of his model, the function, is “understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action” (1968, 21). Functions are thus dynamic elements of actions, which jointly form the developing story. While not all functions have to be realised by a fairy tale, the chain of thirty-one functions cannot undergo any change: it is “the basic form of fairy tales in general” (1968, 89), that is, a stable sequential “scheme” (see 65, 107). 1.

2. 3. 4.

Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. [. . .] The sequence of functions is always identical. [. . .] Tales with identical functions can be considered as belonging to one type. [. . .] All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure. (Propp 1968, 21–23, italics in the original, deleted italics are my emphasis)

A. J. Greimas’s semiotic theory should be given a bit more space here for two reasons: firstly, because his work is of fundamental importance within the debate, as it prefigures many later approaches; and secondly, because there is an interesting interplay of dynamism and schematism in his approach. The complexity of his theory, including the historical developments and revisions that

137 “The minimal complete plot consists in the passage from one equilibrium to another. An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical” (Todorov 1977, 111). 138 The letters stand for “equilibrium – disequilibrium – qualitatively new equilibrium.” 139 Structuralist narratological approaches tend to equate the degree of narrativity and the good versus bad quality of narratives (see section 2.3.6).

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occur throughout Greimas’s most important works,140 refuses to comply with a short summary. Nonetheless, in order to prevent passing over one of the most influential semioticians of narrative, I would like to outline, as briefly as possible, Greimas’s “canonical narrative schema” (CNS) and its theoretical foundations.141 My summary is primarily concerned with Greimas’s actantial and transformational model142 as well as with its further development in Greimas’s and Courtés’s (1979; 1986) semiotic dictionary and in Courtés’s (1991) introduction into classical semiotics. (i) The generative trajectory. One of the most criticised elements of Greimas’s theory is the parcours génératif (see Greimas and Courtés 1979, 157–160): a “semiotic model which aims at accounting for the generation of discourses of any semiotic system” (Nöth 1995, 315). According to this model, any discourse springs from an abstract, deep-level of signification – the so-called “semio-narrative structures” – which is constituted itself by a deep level and a surface level. The deep-level of semio-narrative structures contains “elementary structures of signification” (Nöth 1995, 316), e.g. binary conceptual-semantic pairs of signification (Greimas’s “semiotic squares”). The surface level provides these basic abstract structures with an anthropomorphic, narrative shape insofar as it fuses actantial roles with syntactical structures (narrative propositions). The generative trajectory then enters the level of “discoursive structures” where the surface structures of the semionarrative level are transformed into discourse: narrative actors become located in time and space (“actorialisation”, “temporalisation”, “spatialisation”, see Greimas and Courtés 1979, 160). Moreover, the discourse gains coherence by “the isotopic concatenation of abstract themes which may be connected with concrete figures” (Nöth 1995, 317). Greimas’s model thus “describes discourse production as a process developing in various stages, each with a syntactic and a semantic component” (Nöth 1995, 315). (ii) The actantial model. Greimas’s theory takes Propp’s “scheme” (as well as other approaches, especially Soriau’s) as a basis. His theory aims to reduce the large amount of Proppian functions and seeks to discover more basic, semantic

140 Sémantique structurale (1966), Du sens. Essais sémiotiques (1970), Du sens II. Essais sémiotiques (1983), Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte (1976), Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage I (1979) and II (1986) (together with Joseph Courtés). 141 In order to achieve a full understanding of Greimas’s theory, I propose readers consult further literature by and on Greimas. An introduction as well as further bibliographical references can be found, e.g., in Nöth (1995). 142 See the chapters “A la recherche des modèles de transformation” and “Réflexions sur les modèles actantiels” of his seminal work Sémantique structurale (1966).

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deep structures, which underlie the surface structure of narrative discourse. He thus reduces the seven “dramatis personae”, identified by Propp, to six actants,143 which form pairs: the subject and the object (sujet, objet), the sender and the receiver (destinateur, destinataire), the helper and the opponent (adujvant, opposant) (see Greimas 1966b, 180). The key element of this “mythical actantial model” is a unilateral “teleological” relationship: the subject desires the object (for example, the hero wishes to be conjoint with the princess). The second important element of the model is the relation of “communication” between the sender and the receiver (for instance, the father of the princess asks the hero to free the kidnapped princess and offers the hand of his daughter as a reward; in this example, there is “actantial syncretism” between the subject and the receiver). The roles of the helper (e.g., a fairy) and the opponent (e.g., a dragon) are considered as secondary, since, according to Greimas, they are only “projections of the will to act and the imaginary resistance of the subject itself, judged beneficial or harmful in relationship to its desire” (Greimas 1983, 206).144 (iii) The model of transformation. Greimas’s model of transformation is more abstract than the actantial model,145 but still compatible with it (see Figure 3). Greimas (1966a) identifies a basic threefold narrative sequence on the narrative macro-level (A, F, C), which is constituted by two symmetrical elements (the first and the last) and an intervening asymmetrical element, which represents the kernel of the narrative as a syntagm. “A” refers to the breach of contract, or, more generally speaking, to a “breakdown of order” (rupture de l’ordre, Greimas 1966a, 201), which is due either to a certain lack (manque) or to treachery (traîtrise). This is the condition for “F”, which is an action (or a sequence of actions) that aims at re-establishing the order. For instance, if the princess has been kidnapped by a dragon, this represents a violation of the existing order. A hero, sent out to bring her back, will need to fight against the dragon; this is the condition for the reestablishment of order. Thus, “C” represents the result of the fight, which is symmetrical

143 While the term “actor” designates a specific character in a concrete text (contes-occurrences), “actants” denote “classes of actors” as a result of the functional analysis of narrative texts. Actants are general roles that have the same function in different narrative texts. See Greimas (1966b, 175). 144 “[. . .] on comprend bien que l’adjuvant et l’opposant ne soient que des projections de la volonté d’agir et des résistances imaginaires du sujet lui-même, jugées bénéfiques ou maléfiques par rapport à son désir” (Greimas 1966b, 180) 145 Greimas’s theory of actants has been criticised by Herman because it “does not seem to afford a basis for establishing principled, nonrandom relations between textual cues and inferences about participants” (2002, 11).

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to “A” inasmuch as the sequence “A, F, C” represents a transformation (F) of disorder (A) into order (C).

~ A (AGREEMENT): structure of the contract [relationship of communication] Sender

Object

Receiver

[teleological relationship of desire] Helper [projection of the subject's will to act]

Subject

~C (consequence) acquisition of the desired object

Antagonist [projection of the subject's resistances]

~F (FIGHT, combat) opposition of forces Figure 3: Correspondences between Greimas’s actantial model and his model of transformation.

Greimas’s model of transformation complies with the actantial model. F manifests the oppositional forces of the helper and the antagonist; A corresponds to the contractual relationship of communication between the sender and the receiver (for instance, the hero’s willingness to free the princess from the dragon is an agreement between him and the princess’s father, which aims to reestablish the initial order). Finally, C represents the fulfilment of the desire of the subject (the hero is rewarded for his successful fight, according to the agreement between him and the princess’s father, with the hand of the princess). More abstracly speaking, Greimas’s model of transformation amounts to a very basic narrative structure, which can be reformulated as a transformative action, which bridges two different successive states (see Courtés 1991, 72). Such a basic threefold structure has been claimed by a variety of approaches (see Adam 1978, 110–112), inter alia by Todorov’s threefold narrative schema (see above). The basic distinction between state and transformation has been reformulated as the distinction between two verbs, namely the stative verb être (“to be”) and the dynamic verb faire (“to do” or “to make”). For Greimas, faire (F) forms the essence of a narrative, giving a dynamic syntagmatic (successive) shape to the atemporal, paradigmatic-semantic opposition between two states of being (two sorts of être) (namely A and C). Considered from this angle, the so-called “teleological” relationship (i.e., the subject’s desire of the object) can be reconceptualised

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as bringing two states (être) into opposition, namely that of being separated from the desired object (état disjonctif) and that of being conjoint to the desired object (état conjonctif). This is the basis for Greimas’ “narrative programme” (programme narratif, PN),146 which is an elementary narrative micro-structure. It has two basic forms, according to which the subject S1 acts (F: transformation, faire) in such a way that the other subject (S2) is either conjoint (∩) or separated (∪) from the valuable object (O): (1) PN = F {S1 → (S2 ∩ O)} (2) PN = F {S1 → (S2 ∪ O)} (Courtés 1991, 79) Obviously, Greimas’s conception of narrativity is dynamic with regard to the story, insofar as its core is a transformative action or faire. It thus prefigures in particular those “postclassical” definitions of narrativity that are centred on eventfulness inasmuch as they rely on the idea of a “change of state” and of “a similarity and a contrast between the[se] states” (Schmid 2003, 19).147

146 The PN is only the lowest of three narrative levels, distinguished by Greimas and Courtés (1979, 243). The PN is constitued by “syntactical actants” (actants syntaxiques). Since a PN can be presupposed by another PN and that one again by another, several PNs form, on a second level, a hypotactical cluster – the so-called “narrative trajectory” (parcours narratif), which presents actantial roles (rôles actantiels). There are three “narrative trajectories” (each of which has the structure A, F, C), which successively constitute, on the third narrative (macro- ) level, a general syntagmatic narrative schema of human experientiality, presenting “functional actants” (actants fonctionnels). These three trajectories are: (i) (A): the qualification of the subject (A1, F1, C1; épreuve qualifiante), which points to the “introduction of the subject into life” (Greimas and Courtés 1979, 245, transl. mine); (ii) (F): the realisation of the subject by means of what it does (A2, F2, C2: épreuve principale); and finally (iii) (C): the sanction (A3, F3, C3; épreuve glorifiante: reward or punishment), which gives a sense to the subject’s acts. Courtés highlights the fact that this threefold model resembles Bremond’s “elementary sequence”, which begins with a situation that presents a virtual possibility; this possibility may be actualised or not; if it is actualised, it may be successfully realised or not. The difference, however, consists of the direction that one takes in reading this sequence. While Bremond offers a chronological reading that proceeds from the virtual through the actualisation to the realisation, Greimas and Courtés offer a reading that takes the opposite direction, such that the logic of the narrative becomes apparent (logique à rebours, see Greimas and Courtés 1979, 245; Courtés 1991, 86). The final result (success or failure) in the domain of realisation is logically presupposed by the actualisation that temporally precedes it; the actualisation is itself logically presupposed by the initial virtual possibilities. Courtés gives an illustrative example of the two readings by means of his analysis of the folk tale “Cinderella” (see Courtés 1991, 86). 147 Such approaches go, however, further inasmuch as they integrate “mental changes” (Schmid 2003, 23–24), factors that heighten or lower the degree of eventfulness (see 26–29) as well as “contextual factors” (see 24–25).

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The interplay of dynamic and static elements at the level of story becomes especially obvious in the “canonical narrative schema” (schéma narratif canonique, SNC), which is based on relationships between the static verb être (to be) and the dynamic verb faire (to do) (see Figure 4 below). The core element of the SNC is an action (faire). The action (e.g., freeing the princess) is constituted by a performance (e.g., the fight against the dragon). A performance is an act of transformation that causes a new (i.e., a change of) state (“faire → être”) within the domain of realisation. This transformation presupposes that the subject has the corresponding competence. Competence denotes a state of being (être) that makes the performed or realised action (faire) possible (“être → faire”); it therefore embraces the domain of virtuality and of actualisation.

Figure 4: The canonical narrative schema (adapted from Courtés’s Analyse sémiotique du discours: De l’énoncé à l’énonciation, ©1991 Hachette Supérieur, 100). Four explanatory hints have to be given as to how to understand this narrative schema. Firstly, the arrows that connect the squares in Figure 4 illustrate the direction of presupposition. Secondly, the narrative schema is applicable to narrative structures of different size, be it an entire novel or only a part of the plot. Thirdly, the model allows for recursion: a plot element can simultaneously represent, for example, the “sanction” (and thus the ending point) of a first narrative schema and “the action” of a second narrative schema (resulting again in a new sanction). Finally, the narrative discourse does not have to present explicitly all of the elements in the model, since the CNS represents a cognitive-narrative deep structure. As Greimas puts it in a conversation with Paul Ricœur, “when we speak about semio-narrative structures we are in fact dealing with kinds of universals of language, or rather with narrative universals. If we were not afraid of metaphysics we could say that these are properties of the human mind” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 555). With respect to the narrative schema, Greimas claims the existence of a narrative (discursive) knowhow that permits us to give a syntagmatic, “humanized” shape of eventfulness to static, paradigmatic structures of non-anthropomorphic signification (see Greimas 1966a, 206, 213).

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Competence is one of the necessary prerequisites of the action, which consist of wanting-to-do (vouloir faire), having-to-do (devoir faire), knowing-how-to -do (savoir faire) and being-able-to-do (pouvoir faire) (see Hébert 2006). The action may be presupposed by the action of another subject (the sender) that provokes the action of the first subject by its own action (“faire → faire”). The action is thus presupposed by an act of “manipulation”. The sanction finally – reward or punishment (e.g., the rewarding of the hero by the father of the princess) – presupposes that an action (e.g., the freeing of the princess) and a manipulation (the sending of the hero by the father of the princess) has taken place. “Sanction” means that the sender passes an epistemic judgement on the new situation, thereby evaluating the state of being (= judgment) of the state of being (= new situation) (“être → être”) (see Courtés 1991, 100–102). The SNC illustrates well Greimas’s aim to deduce universal narrative structures from a deep-structural semantic logic, which theorises the narrative interplay of states of being (être) and changes of state (faire). While the symmetrical clarity and semiotic logic of the SNC provides a rigid narrative schema, it entails narrative dynamics (namely the “action”) as its core element. One of the objects of repeated criticism is Greimas’s claim of an equivalence between the deep-structural and the surface-structural levels. Ricœur criticises, on the one hand, that Greimas’s logico-paradigmatic models (such as the semiotic square and the modèle de constitution) presuppose the teleology of the plot as the result of the processes of transformation (from deep to surface structures) (see Ricœur 1984, 86). As he puts it in a conversation with Greimas, “you cannot have spatialization, temporalization, and actorialization without plot” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 556). For Ricœur, Greimas’s deep structures cannot be intrinsically narrative, because they lack the temporal dimension that develops with the dynamisation of the taxonomic deep structures. As a reply, Greimas explains that the differentiation of deep and surface structures has been “a methodological choice” (554), and that he conceives of deep-structures as a “set of constraints” imposed on us by “the human condition” (555). Greimas also admits that the ascendance from the deep to the surface level brings about “a progressive increase in signification” (555). For Ricœur (1984, 86–87), the logical design of the deep-structural taxonomies precludes the eventfulness, the tellability and surprising newness148 that characterises narratives. In the interview with Greimas, he presents even the idea that the figural level of narratives is productive by itself, feeding eventually back

148 What I call “newness” has been theorised, for example, by Herman (but only with regard to the “storyworld”) as a “disruption or disequilibrium” (2009a, 14, 105–136).

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on the deep-structural level. In his response, Greimas attempts to correct Ricœur’s too literal understanding of the deep-structure: as he explains, narrative (deep) structures should be understood in terms of their virtual status. They “do not exist per se but are a mere moment in the generation of signification” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 557).149 Bres (1994) criticises the non-equivalence between Greimas’s two levels as well. For Bres, the dynamics of plot and enunciation cannot be integrated into the deep-structural conception of the organisation of meaning (see 1994, 20–30). Furthermore, he criticises that Greimas’s model overgeneralises narrativity insofar as it produces narrative analyses of any text, any text-based communication and any action – in Greimas’s theory, everything is narrative. He is also critical about Greimas’s postulation of immanency, insofar as the linguistic, semio-narrative faire has its origins not in language, but in a mundane reality.150 Bres’s main criticism, however, is anchored in his praxematic perspective according to which narration, i.e. the production of meaning, is an action in its own right, which is not predetermined by any deep structure. Bres therefore claims that meaning follows from narration and does not precede it.151 Greimas, however, understands the development of surface structures out of deep structure less in temporal than in analytical-systematic terms: “To begin with deep structures and go toward the surface structures is perhaps a question of strategy” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 558). Drawing on implied meanings (the sentence “It is warm.” can imply the imperative “Open the window!”) and on the “language” of spatial configuration in Zola’s Germinal, Greimas explains further that “the discursive level of semiotics is a level in which there is an articulation, a level at 149 Ricœur criticises, thirdly, that the grammar of the narrative surface bears traces of the praxeological semantics of actions (1984, 88–89), which cannot be found on the deep-structural level. According to Ricœur, this hybridity (on the surface levels) speaks against the equivalence of the two levels as well. Ricœur also wants to know how Greimas positions himself towards the story-discourse dichotomy and theories of narrative that are centred on narrative discourse, focalisation, the narrator and her/his voice and structures of enunciation. Greimas responds that the theory of actants might possibly be extended, such that discourse might possess its own actants: an observer-actant for the focaliser and an informer-actant for the narrator (see Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 559). 150 “Si la narrativité s’organise selon la catégorie du faire [. . .], c’est que ce faire est la prise en charge en langue de l’agir référentiel” (Bres 1994, 33). 151 “Le narré n’est pas logiquement antérieur au narrant; il est bien plutôt le produit de la fonction référentielle du langage dans son interaction avec la praxis” (Bres 1994, 34). In other words: “Nous dirons que la conception sémiotique qui dérive le faire du récit des transformations de la structure profonde est idéaliste. L’organisation de la signification procède de et non précède l’action de l’homme sur le monde. C’est par/pour son agir que l’homme donne sens au monde” (35, orig. emphasis).

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which other levels of depth can be found. The problematics of levels is a strategy because the number of levels can be increased or diminished in order to facilitate the analysis” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 560). What is interesting about the criticism of Greimas is the fact that it reveals divergent interests in different kinds of dynamics. Greimas’s model focuses on two dynamics: on the dynamics of action (faire) on the deep level of the narrative story and on the dynamics of transformation by which deep structures produce (or can be deduced from)152 surface structures. Ricœur’s attack, by contrast, seems to be grounded in his interest in the role that the dynamics of time play for narrative mimesis and emplotment. Correspondingly, he reproaches semioticians such as Greimas with “conferring an achronic status on the deep structures of a narrative” (Ricœur 1985, 5). Bres’s criticism of both Greimas and Ricœur, for its part, results from the author’s interest into the dynamics of narrative enunciation. While Greimas analyses the faire on the (deep) level of the story, Bres is interested in the faire of the act of narration itself. He shares Ricœur’s focus on temporal dynamics and also Ricœur’s criticism of Greimas, but time is for Bres not only a dimension of story and discourse (emplotment). For him, the act of narration (énonciation) itself is a response and solution to the disparity of cosmic and phenomenological time (1994, 58), a way of mastering the “descendance”153 of time by means of an enunciative (narratorial) activity, which allows the subject to establish its identity.154 Ricœur and Bres seem to feel uncomfortable not only with Greimas’s theoretical neglect of time, but also with the internal logic of his semiotic system insofar as the latter creates predictability and thus the opposite of what counts as a core dimension of narrativity, its “creativity”155 – the occurrence of something new and unexpected. If every narrative can be reduced to an underlying logical system of semiotic relationships, such as the semiotic square, narratives can produce no unforeseeable results, since the result is already encoded in the logic that precedes and produces the narrative act. If narrativity produces “tellable”, unexpected, surprising plots, its definition must restrict itself to the 152 As Greimas explains, “we can very well imagine an analyst dealing with a realized discourse would begin with the surface before going on to the deep structures” (Greimas and Ricœur 1989, 559). 153 Bres borrows this concept from Guillaume, see Bres (1994, 130–131). 154 “Le récit [. . .] rapporte un écart parce que c’est dans l’écart que le sujet construit son identité (conscience de soi)” (Bres 1994, 175). For Bres, “la langue n’est plus seulement neutralisation de la fluence temporelle mais son inversion active: le temps n’est pas éliminé dans l’instant d’opérativité mais il rend possible l’exercice de la parole par le sujet. C’est seulement dans cet exercice que le temps devient humain” (1994, 123). 155 “Il faut bien que la logicité soit quelque part inadéquate à la créativité propre du récit” (Ricœur 1984, 90).

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processes that enable the creation of (always new) narrative results. A narrative schema that covers all possible narrative results is thus considered to betray the dynamic nature of narrativity. The criticism of Greimas is thus anchored in an understanding of narrativity according to which the result of narration has to remain a theoretical gap; it consists of a newness, tellability or surprise (i.e. of a dynamic core) that risks vanishing if one concretises (i.e. schematises) it. Nonetheless, there are also models of narrativity that theorise narrative dynamics (rather than drawing narrative schemata) and that nonetheless anticipate narrative results, thus exemplifying once again the dialectics between dynamism and schematism. An example in case is Fludernik’s (1996) model of four levels of cognitive frames and parameters (see above). Especially her idea of narrativisation has – at least at first sight – the great merit of highlighting the dynamic dimension of narrativity: “This process of narrativization, of making something a narrative by the sheer act of imposing narrativity on it, needs to be located in the dynamic reading process where [. . .] interpretative recuperations hold sway” (1996, 34). But the dynamic design of her approach is impaired by the fact that narrativisation presupposes that this process of interpretation has necessarily a happy ending, a positive result, namely the successful ‘naturalisation’ of the text in terms of “experiential” frames. If this is not the case, the text is denied its narrativity.156 Narrativity is thus defined in terms of the positive result of the dynamics of narrativisation, not in terms of the interpretative processes as such. This is the point where Fludernik’s model loses much of its dynamic design, since, if the readerly dynamics (i.e. the readers’ search for coherence) are defined by their success, then the dynamics as such are theoretically superfluous. In her theory, processes of narrativisation are not narrative by themselves, but only insofar as they lead to a result that is predetermined by the “narrative schemata” of the first three levels. One could just as well define the “narrative” result directly. In the upshot, Fludernik defines narrativity not really as a dynamics, but as the static result of dynamic processes. How is this (involuntarily static) resultative narrativity defined in Fludernik’s model? Basically, it is defined as cognitive representations – more precisely, as frames, which pertain to three levels of cognitive parameters. If the successful application of these frames is considered to create narrativity, it is these frames that represent the source and essence of narrativity. Interestingly, these hierarchically ordered parameters are partly equivalent to the textual hierarchy of story and 156 “When narrativization breaks down, whether implicitly or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk” (Fludernik 1996, 317).

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discourse (see section 2.3.1). Fludernik’s first-level schemata of action and experience represent typical contents of story-oriented, text-based definitions157 and the narratological-generic concepts of her third level of parameters represent forms of narrative discourse.158 Fludernik’s model can thus be said to be based on the cognitive equivalents of textual dimensions of narrativity; in other words, it gives traditional, text-based definitions of narrative or narrativity a cognitive design. Nonetheless, Fludernik’s ‘natural narratology’, especially her concept of narrativisation, has the merit of highlighting the role that the readerly creation of coherence (‘naturalisation’) plays in narrativity.

2.3.5 Static versus dynamic coherence Coherence has tended to be regarded as a textlinguistic notion, which “denotes those qualities and structures in the design of a text that prompt language users to judge that ‘everything fits’, that the identified textual parts all contribute to a whole, which is communicationally effective” (Toolan 2014, 65). For de Beaugrande and Dressler, coherence is even one of the seven “standards” of textuality (see 1983, 3–4). They argue that “[a] text ‘makes sense’ because there is a continuity of senses among the knowledge activated by the expressions of the text [. . .]. We would define this continuity of senses as the foundation of coherence, being the mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations” (1983, 84, orig. emphasis deleted). De Beaugrande’s and Dressler’s understanding of coherence as the construction of a continuity of sense remains valid today (see Blumenthal 1997, 114; Schwarz 2001, 22). There is, however, a basic disagreement concerning the question of what carries more weight in the creation of coherence: the text or the cognitive (inferential, interpretative, etc.) processes of the reader.159 Narrativity has been

157 See, for example, the fourth and fifth criteria of Ryan’s definition of narrativity: “(4) Some of the participants in the events must be human or anthropomorphic agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. (5) Some of the events must be purposeful action by these agents, i.e. the agents must be motivated by conflicts and their deeds must be aimed toward the solving of problems” (Ryan 2006, 194). 158 Fludernik’s (1996) second level of story-telling parameters can perhaps be considered as a hybrid: it can be linked both to story and discourse. 159 At issue is, on the one hand, the difference between cohesion and coherence (see, for example, Bublitz 1998). Recent psycholinguistic theories of discourse processing approach the conceptual continuity of coherence by analysing the ways in which readers build “situation models” (for surveys, see Tapiero 2007 and Traxler 2012). A more detailed discussion of coherence is provided in chapter 3.

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considered to be bound to various forms of textual coherence, be it character continuity,160 causal coherence161 or the coherent representation of a conflict or change.162 Nonetheless, “it is now widely recognized that coherence is ultimately a pragmatically-determined quality, requiring close attention to the specific sense made of the text in the cultural context” (Toolan 2014, 66). An analysis of narratological theories reveals a further dichotomy to be of utmost importance with regard to narrative coherence, namely that between static and dynamic coherence. Drawing on Viehweger’s conception of coherence as a “dynamic procedure” (1989, 262) and on Bublitz’s observation that “coherence is [. . .] frequently dynamic, i.e., a process rather than a state” (1998, 12), I have proposed to distinguish, terminologically, two dimensions of coherence, namely coherence-as-a-result versus coherence-as-a-dynamics [.. .]. The former, which may be termed resultative coherence, denotes the existence of a (more or less) unified, fully integrated whole. The dynamic dimension of coherence, by contrast, for which I would like to introduce the term coherence in progress, refers to processes which aim at (or work towards) the establishment of such a unifying, integrated gestalt or structure. These two dimensions of coherence are, of course, interrelated: coherence in progress may lead to resultative coherence. (Wagner 2017, 509)

I would like to illustrate the importance of this distinction by reference to the approaches of Barthes (1966), Dancygier (2012b), Boje (2007), Strawson (2004), Hyvärinen et al. (2010a, b) and Hyvärinen (2012). Barthes’s (1966) structuralist approach is somehow ambiguous with regard to the difference between resultative coherence and coherence in progress. He highlights the dynamic aspects of coherence insofar as he reflects upon readerly processes of meaning-making: “Comprendre un récit, ce n’est pas seulement suivre le dévidement de l’histoire, c’est aussi y reconnaître des ‘étages’, projeter les enchaînements horizontaux du ‘fil’ narratif sur un axe implicitement vertical” (1966, 5).163 But he also ascribes wholeness to the narrative discourse insofar as he compares it, structurally, to a sentence (“le discours doit être naturellement

160 Chatman, for instance, requires that “the identity of existents is fixed and continuing” (1978, 31). 161 See, e.g., Trabasso, Secco and van den Broek (1984). 162 Prince explains that if readers experience “difficulty [. . .] in comprehending the link between modifier and modified, the explanation of the change will not be acceptable or convincing and narrativity will suffer” (1982, 154). 163 “To understand a narrative is not only to follow the unfolding of the story but also to recognize in it a number of ‘strata’, to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative onto an implicitly vertical axis” (Barthes 1975, 243).

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l’objet d’une seconde linguistique”, 1966, 3)164 in which different levels of unities (fonctions, action, narration) form a hierarchical whole.165 In S/Z, however, Barthes decisively positions himself on the side of dynamic openness, considering the text to be a “plural” and “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds” (2000, 5). As he explains, “there is never a whole of the text (which would by reversion form an internal order, a reconciliation of complementary parts, under the paternal eye of the representative Model): the text must simultaneously be distinguished from its exterior and from its totality” (5). Dancygier’s (2012b) approach is dedicated specifically to narrative coherence and is therefore worth a more detailed reconstruction. Her theoretical model aims at explaining how local and global structures of narrative texts become conceptually integrated, thereby leading to the emergence of a coherent story. The central elements of Dancygier’s model are so-called “narrative spaces”, which are comparable with the mental spaces in ‘blending’ theory (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Narrative spaces are “partial narrative structures” (Dancygier 2012b, 36) that are set up by language expressions and structured by grammatical choices such as person and tense. A narrative space has its own spatio-temporal topology, participants (narrators and/or characters) and, above all, its own viewpoint. That is, each narrative space posits a viewing subject, thereby providing a spatio-temporal, epistemic or ideological filter through which the events are narrated. Narrative spaces vary from high elaboration to bare mention (see 35–36). Dancygier distinguishes different kinds of narrative spaces, which display a hierarchical organisation.166 The “story-viewpoint space” (SV-space) constitutes the highest level of her model. In this space, “the ‘narrator’, or some features of narratorship, are located” (63). The SV-space has the entire text in its scope (see 198), embedding, on the next hierarchical degree, the “main narrative space” (MN-space), which represents the “overarching narrative structure (primary plot)” (63). The MN-space, which possibly possesses an intradiegetic

164 “[. . .] discourse must naturally be the object of a second linguistics” (Barthes 1975, 240). 165 “[O]n ne peut douter que le récit soit une hiérarchie d’instances” (Barthes 1966, 5). And: “Le niveau narrationnel est donc occupé par les signes de la narrativité, l’ensemble des opérateurs qui réintègrent fonctions et actions dans la communication narrative, articulée sur son donateur et son destinataire” (1966, 21, emphasis mine). 166 Additional spaces can be added, depending on the idiosyncratic composition of the narrative under consideration. Dancygier mentions, for instance, a “metanarrative space” and a “reality-space” (see 2012b, 65, 77).

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narrator, may again consist of a variety of narrative spaces (NS) embedded in it, which may be constituted by past or parallel events, but also by dreams or scenarios imagined by characters. Dancygier thus integrates some ideas of possible-worlds theory: alternate possible worlds (such as future scenarios projected by characters) can be hierarchically conceptualised as narrative spaces embedded in other narrative spaces. Dancygier highlights the “centrality of meaning negotiation to any meaning-emergence processes” (5): “Frames and mental spaces structure inputs, which then become integrated, possibly in ways specific to the reader, into the emergent blend” (35). As far as I see, Dancygier’s theory thus allows for different configurations of one and the same story, as they can result from individual interpretations and thus presents an elegant solution to the S/U problem (see section 2.2). Drawing on blending theory, which forms the theoretical basis of her approach, Dancygier claims that narrative spaces interact with each other by cross-space mapping and blending.167 The story as a coherent whole is considered to be the emergent result of conceptual processes of integration, which take place between all narrative spaces. As an example, a referential expression in a narrative space (“he”, “I” or “Mary”, for example) can refer to a character that participates in another narrative space. Consequently, this linguistic expression functions as a “cross-space identity connector” (98). If this character is identical with the narrator168 of the embedding MN-space, reference patterns are “projected” across the hierarchy of narrative spaces (see 190). This mechanism of cross-space mapping does not apply exclusively to characters, but

167 In fact, Dancygier distinguishes between “cross-space mapping” and “blending” with respect to the degree of conceptual integration that the text manifests linguistically. Cross-space mapping refers, for instance, to cross-space identity connections that the reader may infer from the story as whole. For instance, a narrator or character saying “I” in an embedded NS (conversation) can be identified as one of the characters of the MN-space. But what happens if the conversation is rendered in free indirect speech, using the pronoun “she” (instead of “I”) and language expressions that are typical for the character? With respect to such examples, Dancygier argues that the third-person pronoun indicates the viewpoint of the higher embedding NS, whereas the other expressions that stem from the character itself indicate the viewpoint of the embedded space. Dancygier draws the conclusion that free, indirect speech displays a higher degree of cross-space integration than narrations using a first-person narrator, the former being an example for blending and the latter for cross-space mapping (see Dancygier 2012b, 184ff.) 168 If a character in the MN-space becomes a narrator, “such that the character’s knowledge or intentionality provides the primary focus to the narrative mode”, Dancygier speaks of “Egoviewpoint” (see Dancygier 2012b, 63).

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possibly to all elements of narrative spaces. For example, this could be the case for frame elements of the plot: what in one NS (i.e., according to one narrative space viewpoint) is presented as an accident can be narrated as a suicide in another NS. In such a case, the divergent viewpoints would be incoherent since they offer two different frames for the same event. As a consequence, a socalled “narrative anchor” (see 42–51) is generated.169 The process of story construction consists primarily of “viewpoint compression”: “viewpoint spreads [. . .] through compression across narrative levels, from the lower to higher levels of the story” (90–91).170 According to Dancygier, the multiplicity of viewpoints in narrative discourse is conceptually manageable because a series of compressions brings micro-level viewpoints up to the macrolevel of narrative spaces (see 97). The SV-space thus represents the last stage of compression, the last ‘blend’ (see 172). It is the result of a series of cross-space and blending processes,171 which conceptually integrate the viewpoints of a whole network of narrative spaces into an emergent, coherent story (viewpoint). Viewpoint compression [. . .] is the central mechanism leading to story coherence, as the emergent construct gradually reaches its completeness. The process of reading is thus not simply linear and does not rely primarily on the accumulation of information. It is a multidimensional process, reaching across narrative spaces in different directions. (Dancygier 2012b, 197)

The idea of compression upwards and of embedded narrative spaces gives her model a hierarchical shape, directed towards closure at the narrative macrolevel, while the processes of blending and cross-space mapping simultaneously make it a dynamic network model. Her model has a rhizomatic design insofar as it provides a convincing synthesis of the two dialectically intertwined core aspects of the rhizome: “there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata 169 A narrative anchor is characterised, as far as I can see, by at least two functions. On the one hand, the narrative anchor creates suspense: the reader holds the incoherent (or incomplete) action frame mentally activated in order to complete or to disambiguate the frame as soon as the story yields further information concerning it. On the other hand, since (in our example) the two viewpoints contradict each other, the reader searches for coherence, that is, watches out for what the text will finally reveal as the truth. 170 This hypothesis is consistent with Iser’s idea of a “confluence” of narrative viewpoints, yielding the viewpoint of the text as a whole (see chapter 3). 171 Dancygier distinguishes three processes that lead to the emergence of the story: the embedding of narratives spaces, blending and viewpoint compression. She summarises the blending process as follows: “Clusters of spaces are gradually integrated into larger chunks of the story, until the complete story emerges (this does not preclude lower-level, sentential blends such as FIST [Free Indirect Speech and Thought, ESW])” (2012b, 189).

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and territories” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 3), namely hierarchically and heterarchically differentiated narrative spaces, “but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (3), namely dynamics of cross-space mapping and viewpoint compression, which transversally cut across narrative spaces and levels of signification. At first sight, Dancygier thus seems to combine a static narrative schema of narrative spaces with the dynamics of blending processes. But the added value of her approach goes even further, since she offers a narrative schema that is dynamic by itself. There is not one deep structure according to which all narratives are formed (as in Greimas’s theory, see above), but only idiosyncratic configurations of narrative spaces, which mirror the structure of the respective narrative. To put it briefly, Dancygier offers a flexible framework whose tools are apt to represent a broad variety of narrative kinds. What becomes obvious here, again, is the complex dialectics between dynamics and schemata; also narrative schemata172 can be more or less dynamic. Boje’s (2007) approach is primarily concerned with the narrative practices of organisations. Nonetheless, it is of interest in the present context insofar as Boje turns against the widespread tendency in narratology to define narrative or narrativity173 in terms of emplotment and closure, that is, in terms of a (causally or otherwise) coherent, meaningful whole.174 He rejects the assumption that in organisational narratives, there “must always be plotted storylines, capable of being told anew as tidy narratives that support power structures” (2007, 221). As Boje argues, “there is something more [to narrativity, ESW], something that is swept away by narrative closure” (223), namely a range of dimensions, which he bundles in the notion of the antenarrative. The antenarrative is multiauthored,175

172 In the second sense developed in section 2.3.4. 173 Boje works with an unusual conceptual pair: “story” versus “narrative”. The former denotes episodes and events before they have been brought into an intelligible, coherent plot; the latter denotes the result of emplotment, that is, “accounts of organizational events that are fictively rational, free of tangled contingency and emergence” (Boje 2007, 220). My summary will not elaborate on this distinction because it is not necessary for an understanding of Boje’s main idea. 174 This tendency has also been observed by Toolan: “Although it is not usually foremost among the interests of narratologists, coherence is implicitly regarded as an important feature of narrative. All formalist, structuralist, or psycholinguistic modelings of story that propose any kind of morphology and grammar [. . .] can be viewed as including elements regarded as essential to narrative coherence” (Toolan 2014, 66). 175 According to Boje, “there is a dialectic between antenarratives that are multistranded, multiauthor tellings and the pressure in organizations for collective consensus around official single-author narratives” (Boje 2007, 225).

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polyphonic, polysemic, interactive, intertextual,176 nonlinear, fragmented, emergent177 and rhizomatic.178 The antenarrative should correspond to Ricœur’s first mimesis (see 225) and to “what connects Ricœur’s three mimetic moments, the liminal moves and flows betwixt and between” (226). Also, Antenarrative has a double meaning, emerging from the senses of ante being that which is before and also a bet. Used as an adverb, ante combined with narrative means earlier than narrative. [. . .] Antenarrative derives its organizing force in emergent storytelling where plots are not possible, or at least contested and speculative – rich in polyphony and polysemy. Stories are antenarrative when told without the proper plot sequence and mediated coherence preferred by narrative theorists. Antenarratives lack the cohesive accomplishment of narratives and do not as yet possess their closure of beginning, middle, and ending. Antenarrative is a nonlinear, fragmented, emergent account of incidents or events, after which narrative comes to add more plot and tighter coherence to the storyline. Antenarratives are abundant, interactive, emergent, and cease to be when they become narrative forms. (Boje 2007, 223–224)

As the dimensions of interactivity, of emergence and of the rhizome suggest, the “antenarrative” is characterised primarily by its dynamic nature insofar as “people are always working and living in the middle of collectively mediated antenarrative processes, where few accounts attain narrative closure and fixity” (224). The antenarrative is not independent from, but dialectically intertwined with, narrative (closure) insofar as “dominant narratives are opposed and shattered by a web of antenarratives” (225). Briefly, “antenarrating in its dialectic relation to narrating let us focus on how emergence and fragmentation are continually breaking free of closure” (226). What Boje points out with regard to organisations is close to what Strawson (2004) criticises with regard to psychology: the two criticise narratology’s focus on coherent, narrative forms, which should provide organisations (Boje) or one’s life and personality (Strawson) with identity, stability and closure. Strawson, for his part, criticises both the assumption (labelled “the psychological Narrativity thesis”) “that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories” and the

176 “Antenarrative dynamics include the plurivocal (many voiced), polysemous (rich in multiple interpretations), and dispersed prenarrations that interpenetrate wider social contexts. Antenarrative, therefore, is intertextual: a dialogic conversation among many tellers, listeners, and texts” (Boje 2007, 224). 177 Emergence, for Boje, is the dynamic counterpart of (resultative) coherence, i.e., closure (see Boje 2007, 225). 178 Boje analyses, for instance, “rhizomatic clusters of antenarratives” (Boje 2007, 228–229) and the “dialectic battle between [the] fraud rhizomes and detective rhizomes” of capitalism (234; see also 224, 226, 227, 233).

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conviction (called “the ethical Narrativity thesis”) that this should be so179; in other words, that “experiencing or conceiving one’s life as a narrative is a good thing” (2004, 428). But while Boje attempts to rectify the notion of narrativity by completing the concept of narrative by antenarrative, Strawson works with the given, non-dynamic notion of narrative,180 based on formal coherence and closure,181 but only in order to reject it, as the title of his article (“Against Narrativity”) already reveals. The claim that one becomes a person and gains an identity by integrating one’s life’s episodes into a larger fixed narrative pattern expresses for Strawson “an ideal of control and self-awareness in human life that is mistaken and potentially pernicious” (447), the more so as life urges people to unconsciously revise and change their narratives, to reinterpret life facts or events, which often leads to falsification (443). In a nutshell, for Strawson, the attitude engendered by the two “Narrativity theses” possibly represents “a gross hindrance to self-understanding” (447), especially for those whose “business of living well is [. . .] a completely non-Narrative project” (448).182 Hyvärinen (2012) criticises Strawson (2004) from many different angles183 one of which is especially important in the present context. He reproaches Strawson with basing his argument on a “particularly narrow definition of narrative” (2012, 328) and with ascribing this definition to a “camp” (328) of

179 McAdams, for instance, notes that “story construction – at the level of the individual, group, and even culture – moves (ideally) in the direction of coherence” (2006, 110). 180 He understands (“lower-case”) narrative as “a certain sort of developmental and hence temporal unity or coherence to the things to which it is standardly applied – lives, parts of lives, pieces of writing” (Strawson 2004, 439, orig. emphasis). For Strawson, a narrativised life implies furthermore an “upper-case” and “subjective” narrativity according to which the person whose life is lived narratively “must see or feel it as a narrative, construe it as a narrative, live it as a narrative” (440). 181 Strawson defines narrative by “coherence-seeking, unity-seeking, pattern-seeking” (2004, 441) as well as, at the most general level, by “form-finding” (441, 442). 182 MacIntyre (2007) represents a diametrically opposed position, attacking antinarrative views of the self. He argues inter alia against the position taken by Roquentin in Sartre’s La nausée: “One is to ask: what would human actions deprived of any falsifying narrative order be like? Sartre himself never answers this question; it is striking that in order to show that there are no true narratives, he himself writes a narrative, albeit a fictional one” (2007, 214). He contends that “the characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative” (215). 183 Hyvärinen’s criticism concerns (i) Strawson’s drawing of “argumentative frontlines” (2012, 328), (ii) the “too essentialist” (334) and “too schematic” (335) model of the Episodic versus Diachronic selves, (iii) the inadequacy of his model with regard to narrative literature and (iv) the inappropriateness of what Strawson considers as narrative prototypes.

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narratologists, which is but rhetorically constructed.184 From my point of view, this reproach is not only poorly founded,185 but it is also extremely 184 Hyvärinen criticises that, “instead of [. . .] acknowledging the potential diversity of viewpoints, Strawson simply assumes that his straw-man theory of narrative and narrative identity is universally shared. It is noteworthy how the article projects conventionality and coherence-seeking upon narrativity [. . .]” (Hyärinen 2012, 329, orig. emphasis). His “objective is to denounce Strawson’s proposed array of argumentative front lines, in a way to decamp the field” (328). 185 In order to disprove Strawson’s coherence-based notion of narrativity, Hyvärinen draws on Fludernik’s (1996) “natural narratology” and on Herman’s cognitively based narratology, which are argued to deviate significantly from Strawson’s too narrow notion of narrativity. He notes that Fludernik downgrades temporality (see Fludernik 1996, 21), includes expressly modernist literature and “construes continuity between everyday oral narratives and high literature” (Hyvärinen 2012, 337, orig. emphasis). What goes unnoticed, however, is the fact that Fludernik’s model is nonetheless extremely oriented towards coherence: experientiality is the successful result of the reader’s establishment of coherence (see section 2.3.4) by means of the application of her/his cognitive parameters. Consequently, the counterpart of experientiality, the result of unsuccessful narrativisation, is inconsistency: “When narrativization breaks down, whether implicitly or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency” (Fludernik 1996, 317, emphasis mine). See also Fludernik’s approval of Ryan’s understanding of narrativity as the readerly construction of “coherence and intelligibility” (Ryan 1992, 371; Fludernik 1996, 326). Furthermore, Fludernik’s claim of a continuity between everyday oral narratives and high literature, for its part, underscores the role coherence plays in her definition of narrative. If everyday narratives are mostly coherent and easily intelligible, and if they are the prototype of narratives, then also experimental, modernist narratives, which at first sight seem to challenge norms of coherence, can be argued to be susceptible of being made coherent, that is, of being “read” as “mediating experientiality”. Secondly, I think that his criticism is poorly founded because Hyvärinen’s use of Herman’s theory is not completely convincing either. Hyvärinen is right in highlighting the dynamic dimensions of Herman’s approach, as it manifests itself in his “CAPA” model (see Herman 2013b, 57–71). But the problem is that Hyvärinen tends to reduce Strawson’s definition to the aspect of “conventionality” and then argues that Herman “remains systematically neutral with regard to conventionality” (2012, 338). Herman, however, explicitly explains that, “if I construct in my mind a representation of my own life story but never share it with anyone else [. . .] I have nonetheless produced that account in a context structured by conventions for narrating the story of one’s life [. . .] – conventions with which I bring myself into a relation even when I seek to resist or subvert them” (Herman 2009a, 17–18). Also Herman’s (2009a, 14, 105–136) basic narrative element of “disruption or disequilibrium”, which Hyvärinen (2012, 339) argues to be “the most dramatic difference between Herman’s and Strawson’s conceptions”, does not directly impair Strawson’s definition of narrative at all; Strawson criticises accounts such as that presented by Dennett according to which “[w]e try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story” (quoted in Strawson 2004, 435, emphasis mine) – and already Todorov argued that a good or even “ideal” story includes a “disequilibrium” (see section 2.3.4). In a nutshell, nothing prevents a disruptive event from being integrated into a developmental “coherent” narrative pattern; Hyvärinen’s use of Herman’s theory as a counterargument against Strawson is thus, from my point of view, not entirely convincing.

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astonishing186 since Hyvärinen himself argues, in the introduction of Beyond Narrative Coherence (2010b), together with his co-editors, in quite a similar manner against the “coherence paradigm” according to which narratives, e.g. life stories, are defined primarily by a coherence that amounts inter alia to temporal and thematic closure. In this connection, the authors justifiably draw on the coherence-based understandings of narrativity that have been put forward inter alia by Propp,187 Labov,188 Mink, White189 and McAdams (see Hyvärinen et al. 2010b, 3–6).190 (This list could easily be enlarged by Bremond,191 Prince,192 Ricœur,193 Sturgess,194

186 Hyvärinen’s co-editor Hydén claims, in a way that indeed strongly complies with Strawson’s argument, that “[i]t has been suggested by Oliver Sacks and several others that narratives represent events coherently and in that way constitute identities [. . .]” (Hydén 2010, 36, emphasis mine). 187 Propp understands his morphology as a “description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole” (Propp 1968, 19, emphasis mine). 188 “The skeleton of a narrative [. . .] consists of series of temporally ordered clauses which we may call narrative clauses” (Labov 1972, 361). See also his conception of “[t]he Overall Structure of Narrative” (362ff.) and his idea of narrative completeness according to which narrative clauses “have a beginning, a middle, and an end” (362). 189 “Unlike the annals, the reality that is represented in the historical narrative [. . .] displays to us a formal coherency that we ourselves lack. The historical narrative [. . .] reveals to us a world that is putatively ‘finished’, done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience” (White 1996, 20, orig. emphasis). 190 The authors also discuss the possibly harmful drawback of overly coherent life narratives (Hyvärinen et al. 2010b, 7) ― a point on which Strawson touches as well: “The aspiration to explicit Narrative self-articulation is natural for some [. . .] but in others it is highly unnatural and ruinous. My guess is that it almost does more harm than good” (Strawson 2004, 447). 191 “Tout récit consiste en un discours intégrant une succession d’événements d’intérêt humain dans l’unité d’une même action” (Bremond 1966, 62, emphasis mine). 192 “Narrativity depends also on the extent to which the events presented constitute (or pertain to) a whole, a complete structure with a beginning, a middle and an end” (Prince 1982, 151, emphasis mine). 193 Ricœur’s idea of closure is enclosed in his idea of a “temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous” (Ricœur 1985, 157, emphasis mine). 194 Sturgess contends that “every narrative, at the moment of its inception, will elaborate itself on a causal basis to the moment of its closure. Correlative to this is the perhaps more concrete claim that, confronted by any existing or hypothetical narrative, the reader may assume that its syntagmatic unfolding depends on the presence of causality” (1992, 38, emphasis mine).

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Bres,195 Schaeffer196 and many others.)197 By establishing this list, the authors, however, construct the same sort of “camp” (of coherence-based narrative theories) that Hyvärinen (2012, 328) claims to be but the result of Strawson’s eclectic practice of citation. Indeed, both Hyvärinen et al. (2010b) and Strawson (2004) identify a tendency in narratology to define narrativity in terms of coherence and closure, and the two work against this tendency. But in order to do so, they choose different strategies. Hyvärinen et al. split up the coherence-based notion of narrativity into two concepts – narrativity and coherence – and argue for the dissociation and rejection of the latter concept in favour of the former. This is one way of enabling narrativity to embrace further (dynamic, interactional, rhizomatic, fragmentary, etc.) dimensions. Strawson, by contrast, takes the amalgamated, coherence-based notion of narrativity as it is and expresses his disapproval with it (at least insofar as it is used to prescribe how one should construct one’s life and personality). Hyvärinen’s (2012) criticism of Strawson ultimately amounts to proposing that Strawson should have chosen the same strategy as Hyvärinen et al. (2010b), namely that of modifying the notion of narrativity such that it embraces more dimensions than schematic coherence: Drawing from more recent and more refined narrative theories, he certainly could rephrase and reframe his criticism in more felicitous terms. The re-thinking should, for example, include the shift of emphasis from a narrative to plural narratives, from the narrative to storytelling, and from the static noun ‘narrative’ to the adjectival ‘narrative’, characterizing a number of cognitive, discursive and communicative processes. (Hyvärinen 2012, 342, orig. emphasis)

Although I think that neither of the three options enumerated by Hyvärinen is by itself a solution to the problem of narrativity,198 I share the view of both 195 Bres adopts Aristotle’s idea of the totalité (totality) of the muthos and understands tension (tension représentante) as residing in the interstice of initial and final closure (“de la clôture initiale à la clôture finale”, Bres 1994, 118). 196 “Le récit est donc une forme discursive qui dispose d’un principe de complétude interne: un récit réussi nous apparaît comme ‘complet’ au sens où, arrivés à la fin, nous considérons que le contrat narratif a été rempli par le locuteur ou l’écrivain. En général, l’effet de complétude est assuré par une auto-clôture actantielle (‘et depuis ce jour-là ils vécurent heureux’) ou herméneutique (qu’on pense à Ulysse ou à la Recherche)” (Schaeffer 2010, 217, emphasis mine). 197 What their notions of coherence have in common is that they imply a kind of closure, completeness or wholeness; they differ, however, in many other aspects. 198 First, if one does not know what a narrative consists of, how should it be helpful to shift focus from one to several narratives? Second, what is the difference between narrative and storytelling? If it is the difference between product and process, this still does not answer the question of how they relate to each other, and which role coherence plays in the one versus

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Hyvärinen (2012) and Hyvärinen et al. (2010b) that it is a better to redefine and to broaden the concept of narrativity than to reject it entirely (as Strawson does).199 Such broadening of the concept is performed by the diverse contributions of Hyvärinen et al.’s (2010a) Beyond Narrative Coherence. Medved and Brockmeier, who analyse narratives told by people with neuropsychological impairments, turn against a “representational” idea of narrative, suggesting “a different, discursive, and interactional approach to the question of coherence” (2010, 25). They argue that [. . .] it is a general, in fact, constitutive feature of stories that they are not told as such but always embedded in a conversational dynamic. Thus the coherence of stories [. . .] can change relative to the rhetorical dynamic of the conversation which, in turn, depend [sic] on the interplay among the different strategies, intentions, and narrative competencies of the participants. (Medved and Brockmeier 2010, 25)

Their conception is similar to one of Herman’s “basic elements of narrative”, that of “situatedness”, according to which “narratives are also communicatively situated representations” (Herman 2009a, 17, orig. emphasis).200 Also Ryan welcomes the new, “increased awareness of the socially situated nature of narrative communication” (2006, 193). Hydén, for his part, works out the limits of a representationalist concept of narrativity as well by analysing the “performative force” (2010, 36, 46) of narratives. He observes that “persons with dementia illnesses, brain injuries, and related problems actually use and tell stories in order to claim [i.e., to “put in place”, see 46, ESW] various identities” (33). If narratives not only represent a preceding autobiographical reality, but participate in the creation of this identity, then narrative should be conceptualised “less as a finished product and more as an ongoing activity in a specific social situation” (47).

the other. The same questions and problems apply to Hyvärinen’s proposal to pass from the noun “narrative” to adjectival “narrative”. 199 I also agree that “[o]ne of the paradoxes of the coherence thesis is that it so obviously contradicts what avant-garde literature and film have been doing with narrative. What, for example, has the sequential, chronological and coherence-oriented model to do with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or Henry James?” (Hyvärinen et al. 2010b, 9). In fact, Richardson’s (2006; 2015) research on “unnatural narratives” identifies a host of techniques and structures, primarily in modern and postmodern narratives, which resist or at least considerably complicate readerly attempts of creating or ascribing coherence. 200 For him, “stories are the result of complex transactions involving producers of texts, discourses, or other semiotic artifacts, the texts or artifacts themselves, and interpreters of these narrative productions working with cultural, institutional, genre-based, and textspecific protocols” (Herman 2009a, 17).

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Tamboukou explores the ways in which the letters and paintings of Gwen John resist the construction of a coherent personality. The Welsh artist “is not reducible to the content of her letters and they cannot establish any causal relationship between what she does, why she does what she does and who she is” (2010, 75). John’s art unfolds “in the intermezzo of narrative sequences, in the gaps and interstices between broken narrative lines, in milieus where the event emerges” (78), thus challenging norms of narrative coherence. Hänninen and Koski-Jännes examine the ways in which the autobiographical text of a middle-aged female artist breaks with conventions of narrative; there is, for instance, no chronological unfolding, no establishment of causal relations. They claim that the corresponding incoherence “serves as a psychological means to leave the past behind and yet to avoid premature commitment to a new self-narrative” (2010, 103). The authors thus highlight the functionality of a lack of narrative coherence with regard to the construction of identity insofar as it represents a potential for new, more adequate narratives.201 Andrews, for her part, questions the representational potential of narrative coherence. Traumata resist (quasi by definition) verbalisation and/or coherent narrativisation, since the traumatic experiences have subjectively a chaotic, fundamentally disordered quality, which does not comply with coherent structures of narration. Drawing on stories told by survivors of trauma, Andrews thus reflects on the dubious relationship “between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable” (2010, 159).202 Considered from this angle, forms of silence become the refuge of what is (or has to remain) untold.203 In his afterword to the volume, Freeman states with much perspicacity that “[. . .] nearly every chapter in this books seeks to show that, behind the manifest in-coherence or ‘a-coherence’ of the narratives in question a latent coherence lurks” (2010, 167, orig. emphasis). What is at stake in the contributions to the volume is obviously a kind of coherence that is not statically given, not provided directly by written or told stories, but that can “emerge in and through interpretation” (181). Most importantly, Freeman comes to the conclusion – to which I fully subscribe – “that the idea of coherence itself needs to be

201 Their analysis thus complies well with what Boje (2007) calls the “antenarrative” (see above). 202 “By structuring our experiences into traditional narrative form, do we lend to them a coherence and unity which raw life does not contain?” (Andrews 2010, 152) 203 Freeman conspicuously notes that “[o]n some level, [. . .] experience always exceeds narrative. In extreme situations, this fact becomes more clear” (2010, 183). This idea is consistent with my “semiotic circle” (see section 1.4) insofar as structure and coherence is never identical to, but only one of a range of possible forms given to the irreducible diversity from which it emerges.

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rethought” (171), freed from its schematic and static implications, such that it includes “fluid, interactive, performative” (174), processual and interpretative dimensions. Although he contends that “narrative coherence is [psychologically, ESW] surely not equally necessary for all people” (167), Freeman argues that narrativity as such necessarily implies coherence, in the sense of a “seeing-together and binding-together” (which nonetheless does not have to “culminate in coherent stories”, 185). He thus positions himself against the project, announced by the title of the volume, to move “beyond narrative coherence”, because of the close connection between narrativity and coherence: To move entirely beyond coherence is to move beyond narrative itself, and this, I believe, we cannot do. [. . .] The challenge, therefore, is to think anew both coherence and narrative and in such a way as to render them more appropriate to the complexities of experience. (Freeman 2010, 171)

Freeman’s proposal sheds new light on Hyvärinen’s (2012) criticism of Strawson’s (2004) strategy (see above). Hyvärinen’s criticism can indeed be addressed to Beyond Narrative Coherence as well, but with regard to the notion of coherence. Instead of rejecting the notion altogether (i.e., instead of turning “against” – or moving “beyond” – coherence), the concept of coherence is perhaps better modified or broadened, such as proposed by Freeman.204 The question, however, is whether this conceptual modification is really a work hitherto undone. Coherence is a cross-disciplinary concept, emerging from the scientific discourses not only of narratology, but also of literary studies, textand psycholinguistics as well as of cognitive and semiotic theory. If one wants to work on the notion of coherence, one has to explore the interdisciplinary nexus of this concept. Since this investigation would go beyond the constraints of the present research review, which centres on narrativity, I will devote a proper chapter to it (see chapter 3) and turn now briefly to some further narratological approaches, which highlight the dynamic, plural, rhizomatic, fragmentary and processual aspects of narrative coherence – characteristics that play a crucial role in the distinction between what I deem “representationalist” versus “performative” narrativity.

204 The editors make a first step into this direction by expressing their belief “that coherence is not an objective feature of an individual narrative as a text, but rather is something that has always been produced interactionally, thus implicating the researcher as a coherence-creating or coherence-declining agent” (Hyvärinen et al. 2010b, 10).

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2.3.6 Representationalist versus performative narrativity Especially Hydén’s (2010, 36, 46) and Freeman’s (2010, 174) dynamic accounts of narrative coherence, summarised in the last subchapter, highlight the performative dimension of narrativity, which at least implicitly contrasts with representationalist conceptions. This opposition can be understood as two poles or paradigms205 of definitions of narrativity, which, as far as I see, do not oppose one defining feature of narrativity, but represent a number of clustered oppositional pairs. I would like to offer the following heuristic description of these two poles or paradigms of definitions: Representationalist theories (tend to) ascribe narrativity to the (more or less) orderly textual representation of a (more or less) meaningful “narrative” content. Performative theories (tend to) ascribe narrativity to the “narrative” performance of a recipient during which textual inconsistencies or disorders are sought to be provided with coherence and meaning. If Prince, for instance, claims that “narrative represents a mediation through time between two sets of opposites” (1982, 147), he clearly defends a representationalist conception of narrative, although his approach brings performative aspects into play as well.206 As the heuristic definition suggests, most of the conceptual oppositions that inhere in these clustered poles have already been discussed in this chapter: the oppositions of text versus reader,207 of narrative

205 In my eyes, the question of whether one should call them “two poles” or “two paradigms” of narrativity is a question of epistemological preferences (and perhaps artifice) rather than a qualitative difference. The idea of “two poles” implies the idea of a conceptual continuum, thus offering a place for theories that fall between the two extreme ends of the spectrum. Speaking about “two paradigms” has the advantage of highlighting the contrast that exists between these two ways of approaching narrativity. With regard to the respective advantages and disadvantages of the two wordings, I will use both interchangeably. 206 Prince integrates performative aspects insofar as he claims that narrativity depends on the degree to which the reader identifies narrative features in the text, such as a change of state: “events that cannot be analyzed as meaningfully related to the change presented are narratively inert, threaten narrative coherence and impair narrativity” (Prince 1982, 154). To give a second example, also Herman’s (2009a) theory has partly a representationalist design, since for him a narrative necessarily represents a sequence of (disruptive) events and “conveys what it is like to live through this storyworld” (2009a, 9, emphasis mine). These criteria are, however, in his theory, filtered through the reader who has to be able to discover a sequence in the text and to experience during reading what the storyworld events are like. 207 Sturgess (1992, 15), for instance, argues explicitly for applying “the concept of narrativity [. . .] to the operations of narrative rather than of the reader. It is the narrative which contains

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schemata versus dynamics,208 and of closure versus incoherence, brokenness, openness or the like.209 As we will see below, also the opposition of mimesis and antimimesis and of story versus discourse can play a role here. Of course, readers always have to perform complex activities of consistencybuilding in order to develop a mental representation of narrative contents, including blending, the building of hierarchical structures, the identification and enrichment of mental models and so forth (see chapter 3). The opposition between textual order and disorder and between the corresponding reader activities of consumption versus creation, is thus admittedly a matter of degree.210 Furthermore, it is a matter of (knowledge about) context, since the formal surface of a text and its forms of (dis)order often carry literary-historical implications.211 I conceive of the two poles or paradigms as the ideal-typical extremes of two tendencies, which indeed divide definitions of narrativity – into theories that are built either on the idea of narrative “representation”212 or on the negation of representationalism in terms of some kind of dynamic. Not every representationalist or performative theory is always entirely congruent with each of the assumptions that are clustered in the respective definition. Moreover, they can differ from each other and from their prototypical paradigm insofar as they

narrativity, and this narrativity will precisely include the means by which the reader is encouraged to a lesser or greater degree to ‘actively construct’ the story [. . .]” (emphasis mine). 208 While Greimas, for example, claims that narratives (and discourse in general) always represent on the surface level specific “deep-structural” contents, Medved and Brockmeier (2010, 25) think that “the coherence of stories [. . .] can change relative to the rhetorical dynamic of the conversation”. 209 Schaeffer (2010, 217), for instance, explains that closure is necessary for narrativity: “[. . .] pour qu’un récit soit réussi il faut que son récepteur le considère comme complet et clos sur luimême [. . .]”. Richardson (2006, 215) and the authors of Beyond Narrative Coherence (2010), by contrast, do not consider highly incoherent narratives to lack narrativity, but to display a specific (unnatural, fragmented, broken, rhizomatic, etc.) kind of narrativity, which has its own added value and functions. 210 Even though one cannot draw a clear line between orderly and disorderly narratives, the distinction is nonetheless important, since it allows macro-structural differences between narratives to be covered that are designed to be made coherent by the reader (e.g. in a detective novel) and novels that principally do not allow for the reconstruction of a story (e.g. Robbe Grillet’s La jalousie), whose discourse risks undermining the story (e.g. Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi) or whose “story” is not susceptible of creating an unambiguous overarching structure of meaning, even though it may be temporally and spatially structured (e.g. Kafka’s or Toussaint’s narratives) (see chapters 5 and 6). 211 See chapter 6. 212 Askin notes that “from Barthes to Bal, from Chatman to Genette, and from Culler to Herman [. . .], just to mention some of the classics of narratology, [. . .] all cast narrative as representational” (2015, 167, note 2).

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can agree more or less, explicitly or implicitly, voluntarily or inadvertently with certain assumptions.213 Askin’s theory, for instance, does not fit, at first sight, very well in the performative paradigm, despite its declared antirepresentationalism, because it philosophically rejects mind- or reception-oriented theories. Nonetheless, Askin’s approach highlights dynamic aspect of narrativity, for instance processes of “unfolding” and “infolding” between virtuality and actuality (see Askin 2015, 158) or the selection of “those virtualities that will be made actual” (2015, 159) by way of intensity. His theory has thus a performative shape, even though the performance on which he focuses is not linked to the reader.214 One approach that is especially difficult to locate on this scale is Fludernik’s natural narratology. On the one hand, her model has clearly a representationalist bias, for example as she claims that “[t]he representation of human experience is the central aim of narrative” (1996, 52, emphasis mine) or defines narrativity as “mediated experientiality” (1996, 36, 50, emphasis mine). The past participle “mediated” implies a finished process according to which experientiality has (successfully) been mediated, i.e. represented or conveyed through a specific medium. Fludernik highlights this representationalist dimension also by explaining that “’natural’ narratology bases itself in a very specific definition of narrative which is thematically identified as the presentation of experientiality” (1996, 50).215 On the other hand, Fludernik defends simultaneously a performative conception of narrativity insofar as she conceives of narrativity as readerly processes of narrativisation, of “establishing narrativity in the course of the reading process” (1996, 31). One wonders what her main hypothesis is – that narrativity is an experientiality that is somehow inherent in, presented or mediated by the text or that

213 See, for instance, my discussion of Ricœur in section 2.3.2. 214 Especially with regard to the drawbacks of clustered types (see Sternberg 2010, 613), one has to ask: What is the added value of this ideal-typical opposition? From my point of view, the added value of the distinction consists of the fact that it provides a meta-narratological tool, which allows for the ordering of the complex variety of definitions of narrativity. Furthermore, the two poles can take account of the theoretical connections that exist in narratology and literary theory between the oppositions that are clustered by the two poles or paradigms. 215 Caracciolo criticises Fludernik’s “avowed representationalism about experience and experientiality” (2014, 48). He proposes instead to conceptualise experientiality “as a kind of network that involves, minimally, the recipient of a narrative, his or her experiential background, and the expressive strategies adopted by the author. At the root of experientiality is, then, the tension between the textual design and the recipient’s experiential background” (49).

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is constructed by the reader?216 Obviously, Fludernik tries to link the two poles together. This becomes especially obvious in the way in which she conceptualises mediation and narrativisation in the following diagram:

Figure 5: Fludernik’s (1996, 50) conception of narrativity.

If mediation is synonymous with narrativisation, as the second frame in her figure suggests, then the definition of narrativity as “mediated experientiality” can be reformulated as “narrativised experientiality”. But if narrativity is “narrativised experientiality”, the question is where the “narrative” quality exactly originates. In which way does “experientiality” become “narrativised”? In her theory, narrativisation seems to be a synonym for an ascription: narrativity is an experientiality that interpreters ascribe to a text by means of cognitive frames and parameters. But again: Where, in this definition, is the source of the “narrative” quality? Considering Fludernik’s approach, the source can only lie in the cognitive schemata (and scripts) themselves, since it is their application

216 Correspondingly, Caracciolo obviously has problems locating Fludernik either on the side of representationalism or of performativity. He both attacks her representationalism and admits that “setting Fludernik’s words in the context of her study would enable us to see that her narratological model is, as a matter of fact, highly reader-dependent” (2014, 47–48). As this insight into the performative dimension of Fludernik’s approach somehow delegitimises his attack, Caracciolo mitigates his criticism, claiming “that the implications of this reader-dependency for experientiality can be explored more fully” (47–48). He fails to recognise, however, that the primary flaw of Fludernik’s conception resides in the fact that, in the upshot, it locates narrativity (to speak in terms of the Pyramid) only at the virtual and resultative level of the Pyramid of Narrativity, but not at the level of narrativity in actualisation (as I will argue below, see section 2.4).

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to the text that is termed narrativisation217 and that forms the readerly impression that the text’s topic is a ‘narrative’ kind of human experientiality. If so, Fludernik’s model claims, in the upshot, nothing more than the existence of “narrative schemata”: not only “narrative” frames of action, goal-directedness and intentionality (as in script-based approaches), but also universal and culture-specific frames of storytelling. While Fludernik’s model thus highlights the text-reader interplay, it actually locates the origin of narrativity, i.e. the “narrative” quality itself, in the cognitive schemata (i.e. representations) of the reader. Her model is thus, in the final analysis, representationalist (in a cognitivist sense). The text, however, plays an important role in her theory as well, insofar as it must enable readers to align the unfamiliar textual structures with familiar cognitive-narrative ones.218 There is thus a rivalry between the representative and performative dimensions of the text. Freeman conceptualises this rivalry, in the context of narrative coherence, in terms of simultaneity: Strictly speaking, coherence – and meaning more generally – is neither ‘found’ nor ‘made’. Rather, there is a distinct sense in which it is found and made at one and the same time – or, as I have put it elsewhere, meaning found through being made [. . .]. I am speaking here of poiesis. On one level, I have suggested, the term highlights the constructive, imaginative dimension entailed in the process of meaning-making. But this very process of meaningmaking has as its ultimate aim disclosing what is there, in the world – including the world of the text. (Freeman 2010, 181, orig. emphasis)

But what has to emerge from poiesis? Herman (2009a; 2013b), for instance, argues that a storyworld (and a disruptive sequence of events) must emerge during reading, that is, a mental model that provides readers with the mimetic illusion of observing events that happen in a fictive world. Other researchers, however, underline the fact that mimetic illusion has an important counterpart. At this point, further (sub-)boundaries emerge, which can broadly be aligned with the representationalist versus performative paradigm.

217 For Fludernik (1996, 34), narrativisation denotes a process, “located in the dynamic reading process”, of “making something a narrative by the sheer act of imposing narrativity on it” through the application of conceptual parameters. See also White (1996) and Fludernik (1996, 31–32; 2003). 218 “Natural parameters do not effect narrativization, but narrativization utilizes natural parameters as part of the larger process of naturalization applied by readers to the unfamiliar. Naturalization processes are reading strategies which familiarize the unfamiliar, and they therefore reduce the unexpected to more manageable proportions, aligning it with the familiar” (Fludernik 1996, 46, orig. emphasis).

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(i) Illusion versus break of illusion. One of the dichotomies that concretises the contrast between representationalist and performative approaches is the opposition of (mimetic) illusion and the intentional219 destruction of such an illusion. This opposition can be found, for instance, in Richardson’s conception of the “antimimetic” or “unnatural”. As Richardson explains, Mimetic narratives typically try to conceal their constructedness and appear to resemble nonfictional narratives, while antimimetic narratives flaunt their artificiality and break the ontological boundaries that mimetic works so carefully preserve. (Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 20)

Insofar as, for Richardson, “the key criterion [for unnatural narratives] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion” (2015, 93), it is surprising that Richardson does not draw on Wolf (1993)220 whose voluminous study explores in great detail the opposition of “aesthetic illusion” (ästhetische Illusion) and “break of illusion” (Illusionsdurchbrechung) or of “immersion” and “distance”.221 Wolf’s conceptual opposition is – not unlike my distinction between representationalist and performative definitions – a prototypical cluster of features. These features are anchored in five interdependent, compositional principles, which create illusion, and which are compromised by anti–illusionist texts, namely the principles of (i) vivid worldliness (“anschauliche Welthaftigkeit”), according to which the text enables the reader to imagine vividly a fictive world and reality, which seems to exist objectively and independently from the narrative situation and medium; (ii) adequacy of the medium (“Mediumsadäquatheit”), according to which the text respects the conventions and limits of the verbal narrative medium222; (iii) meaningfulness (“Sinnzentriertheit”), according to which texts fulfil the readers’ expectations by representing a causally or teleologically coherent series of events and a continuity of time, space and characters; (iv) perspectival homogeneity (“perspektivische Präsentation”), which enables readers to acknowledge unambiguously the perspectival source of the narration and to identify with it; (v) tellability (“Interessantheit”), according to which the text stimulates the cognitive or affective responses of the reader, inter alia by the creation of gaps, eventful plots and suspense.

219 Richardson defines the unnatural as an “intentional transgression of conventional mimetic or nonmimetic conventions” (2015, 5, orig. emphasis). 220 My summary is based on that presented by Bauer and Sander (2004). 221 See Wolf, Bernhart and Mahler (2013). 222 This principle includes a limited amount of descriptions, the narration of a story, an unambiguous assignment of utterances to the respective characters and the intact separation of narrative levels (proscription of metalepses) (see Bauer and Sander 2004, 204–206).

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Narratives that create aesthetic illusion are representationalist in nature insofar as they foster the immersion of the reader into the mimetic reality of the text, the narrative world. Anti–illusionist narratives, by contrast, pertain to the performative pole to the extent to which they prevent readers from narrative immersion and distract them from the represented narrative content. Performative narrativity creates a distance between the reader and textual content. Anti–illusionist texts throw readers back onto themselves (and onto the situation of narrative communication); thus the readers’ cognition becomes the place where the work’s narrativity performatively comes into being. Herman’s (2013b) approach, which concentrates on narrative worldbuilding, takes up the same dialectic opposition under the heading of “Worlding/ Unworlding the Story” (2013b, 144). The idea of “unworlding” refers to narrative designs, which “call attention to the structures and functions of storytelling itself” (144). As Herman observes, Ochs and Capps (2001, 4) distinguish similarly between “the desire to construct an overarching storyline that ties events together in a seamless explanatory framework” (akin to narrative closure) and “the desire to capture the complexities of the events experienced” (hostile to narrative closure) and thus to “comment on the world-building procedures that they [narratives, ESW] activate” (Herman 2013b, 145).223 (ii) Transmission of meaning versus creation of meaning. Wolf’s (1993) principle of Sinnzentriertheit implies another dichotomy inherent in the two narratological paradigms: conveyance of meaning versus creation of meaning. According to Wolf, illusionist texts provide readers with a meaningful narrative world while anti–illusionist texts do not fulfil this expectation of meaningfulness. Illusionist texts correspond in this regard to representationalist (definitions of) narrativity according to which texts convey a (narrative)

223 Herman proposes to distinguish between two strategies of “unworlding” the story: a “horizontal” (i.e. syntagmatic) “proliferation of story versions” at the same level and the vertical (i.e. paradigmatic) “ontologically destabilizing conflation of situations and events” (Herman 2013b, 148). It should be noted that Herman wishes to distance himself from “accounts based on an opposition between ‘realistic’ and ‘nonrealistic’, ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, or ‘mimetic’ and ‘antimimetic’ narratives” (2013b, 146), like Richardson’s (2006). Instead, Herman assumes “that a continuum spans stories that engage in more or less reflective modes of narration, and that past a critical threshold for narrativity this continuum then shades off into non- or antinarrative texts” (2013b, 146). Richardson himself has recently mitigated the opposition between natural and unnatural texts in terms of a more “interactive model of mimesis and antimimesis” (2015, 5): “We need to historicize much more dialectically than we have in the past” (2015, 138). He also concedes that “the purely unnatural is perhaps not especially interesting” (2015, 20). This last comment thus takes Herman’s lower “threshold” of tellability into account.

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meaning or meanings, which are somehow encoded in the text. Anti–illusionist texts, by contrast, correspond to performative (definitions of) narrativity according to which the meaning of narratives resides in their effects, that is, in the cognitive-affective or interpretative activities of gestaltbildung performed by readers. Caracciolo offers a comparable opposition, namely between “representation” and “experience”. He contends that “[s]emiotic and mental representations do play a role in readers’ interaction with literary stories, but they are not the whole picture – for the experience readers get out of this interaction cannot be reduced to mental representations” (2014, 10, orig. emphasis). He focuses on a particular aspect of the performative pole of narrativity, namely on the experiential dimension of narrative [. . .], insisting on the situated, embodied quality of readers’ engagement with stories and on how meaning emerges from the experiential interaction between texts and readers. In a nutshell, I will argue that stories offer themselves as imaginative experiences because of the way they draw on and restructure readers’ familiarity with experience itself. (2014, 4, orig. emphasis)

Besides the obvious ways in which Caracciolo’s dichotomy overlaps with my understanding of the representationalist versus performative pole, two further aspects of Caracciolo’s considerations need to be emphasised. On the one hand, by claiming that meaning emerges from the experiential interaction between texts and readers, Caracciolo establishes a direct link between experientiality and narrative meaning. But is the meaning of narratives not part of their narrativity? Does Caracciolo then not work on the concept of narrative or narrativity? Caracciolo himself denies this question, explaining that his study “is less ambitious when it comes to defining narrative, and falls back on existing definitions” (31, orig. emphasis). In my opinion, however, insofar as I conceive of narrative meaning as being an essential part of narrativity (see section 2.4.8), Caracciolo does work on the concept of narrativity, precisely by exploring in detail the experiential dimension of narrativity’s performative pole.224 On the other hand, as he argues that “imaginative experiences [. . .] restructure readers’ familiarity with experience itself” (see above), Caracciolo alludes to the defamiliarising effect of literary narratives, thus bringing the question of literariness into play.225

224 Insofar as Caracciolo (2014, 32) integrates the experiential dimension of narratives into his conception of narrativity, his denial seems to refer primarily to the scope of his theory of experientiality: it focuses on a particular aspect of narrativity – its experiential dimension – and leaves out other important aspects of narrativity, especially questions of coherence. 225 Drawing on Cook (1994) and Lamarque, Caracciolo explicitly links experientiality and literariness: “By addressing some key cultural concerns and questions [. . .], literary stories take on a heightened sense of experientiality for those who participate in literature as an artistic practice. In particular, literary narratives are those that – in a given culture and time – are

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Also Barthes (1976) elaborates on the opposition between the transmission and creation of meaning and draws therefore on literariness, introducing the notions of “readerly” (le lisible) versus “writerly” texts (le scriptible). While readerly texts invite readers to conceive of themselves as consumers who cannot but receive the text and its meaning, writerly texts challenge readers to participate actively in the creation of meaning. Barthes ranks writerly texts explicitly over readerly texts by virtue of his conception of literature: Pourquoi est-ce que le scriptible est notre valeur? Parce que l’enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c’est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte. Notre littérature est marquée par le divorce impitoyable que l’institution littéraire maintient entre le fabricant et l’usager du texte, son propriétaire et son client, son auteur et son lecteur. Ce lecteur est alors plongé dans une sorte d’oisiveté [. . .]: au lieu de jouer lui-même, d’accéder pleinement à l’enchantement du signifiant [. . .], il ne lui reste plus en partage que la pauvre liberté de recevoir ou de rejeter le texte [. . .]. En face du texte scriptible s’établit donc sa contre-valeur, sa valeur négative [. . .]: ce qui peut être lu, mais non écrit: le lisible. Nous appelons classique tout texte lisible. (Barthes 1976, 10, orig. emphasis)226

Barthes makes no pretence of the normative, axiological dimensions of his opposition. His orientation towards the performative pole, i.e. toward the readerly “creation of meaning” cannot be separated from his conception of what literature is or should be.227

seen as having the highest potential for revealing and restructuring readers’ background at the socio-cultural level” (2014, 73; see also 6, 10, 42–43, 85). I elaborate on the connection between narrativity, literariness and coherence in chapter 3. 226 “Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness [. . .]: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier [. . .], he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text [. . .]. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative [. . .] value: what can be read but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text” (Barthes 2000, 4, orig. emphasis). 227 How exactly literature should be, according to Barthes, is however difficult to answer, as Asholt (2016) shows in his essay on Roland Barthes and contemporary literature. As Asholt explains, Barthes has projected his ideal of literature successively on Camus, Cayrol, Robbe-Grillet and Sollers. Nonetheless, a bias towards the performative pole can be detected: Asholt (2016) characterises Barthes’s ideal of zero-degree literature (Degré zéro) inter alia by two features, which fit into what I call the performative paradigm of narrativity: on the one hand, it implies the “becoming-subject” of language, which undermines, as Asholt (2016, 282) remarks, the representational function of language; on the other hand, Barthes prefers fragmented structures, which resist

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(iii) Literary versus non-literary narratives; high versus low narrative quality. This connection between dynamic narrativity and literariness also shines through in Lotman’s (2001) very rich and complex theory of semiospheres. Lotman considers the transmission versus creation of information (i.e., of meaning) as the two (out of three) fundamental functions of semiotic systems. He contends that “artistic” (i.e. artful, e.g. literary) texts serve primarily the function of creating new meaning, while “artificial” ones fulfil the function of conveying meaning. If literariness can be understood as a scale, which extends from zero-degree literariness – that is, from non-literary, pragmatic communication (e.g. conversational storytelling) – to “high literature”, is it then possible to align the two extreme ends of this scale with the two poles of the creation versus transmission of meaning? In other words, does non-literary, pragmatic storytelling tend to convey meaning (representationalist pole) while literary texts trigger the readerly creation of new meaning (performative pole)? In my understanding, this would be a reductionist view, since evidence for representationalist and performative meaning can be found both in literary and in non-literary communication. Labov (1972) observes, in his analysis of conversational storytelling, that the “point” or meaning of a story is generally “conveyed” by the narrative,228 which speaks for an alignment of the representationalist pole with pragmatic communication. Others, by contrast, have underlined the performative dimension of non-literary storytelling. Hydén (2010), for instance, observes that the conversational narratives told by individuals with dementia illnesses, brain injuries and the like do not serve to represent an identity, which has been constructed beforehand, but to create an identity at the moment of narration, through an interaction of narrator and addressee. Also Loots, Coppens and Sermijn (2013) stress the performative dimensions of storytelling (see section 1.6). Bres, for his part, underlines that, if identity has a narrative shape (which Strawson admittedly denies), then its narrativity has to be dynamic and performative in order to allow for development229:

closure, inasmuch as they forestall “totalizing readings” (Asholt 2016, 282), and which challenge the recipient. Furthermore, Barthes characterises literature via intransitivity, that is, by the fact that it constitutes a world that is “signifying, but never ever finally signified” (“signifiant, mais finalement jamais signifié”, quoted in Asholt 2016, 282), thereby revealing, from my point of view, an essentially dynamic – performative – conception of literariness. 228 “There are a great many ways in which the point of a narrative can be conveyed” (Labov 1972, 370). 229 All this seems to depend, thus, on the function of pragmatic storytelling. While in pragmatic contexts the process of constructing one’s identity (or attempts of coping with traumatic or otherwise difficult experiences) seems to foster a performative kind of narrativity, the telling

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S’il existait une intrigue qui produise une identité individuelle ou groupale définitive, ou bien une intrigue de toutes les intrigues, c’en serait fini de toutes les praxis: le sujet serait prisonnier de son image, il y aurait gel de l’identité. (Bres 1994, 71)230

Equating pragmatic, non-literary storytelling with representationalist narrativity would thus remove from consideration the broad variety of storytelling situations and dynamics of narrative interaction.231 The same can be said about the equation of high literature with performative narrativity. Sternberg’s (1990) analysis of the relationship of chronology and narrative theory can exemplify this point. Sternberg identifies in narratology a “bias for [temporal, ESW] disorder which Genette shares with most of his predecessors, and, above all, contemporaries, not least his fellow Structuralist” (1990, 912).232 Temporal disorder urges readers to actively reconstruct the chronology (i.e., the story line), broken by achronic (proleptic, analeptic, etc.) narrative discourse, thus bringing into play the performative dimension of narrativity. Sternberg criticises this narratological link between temporal disorder in the text (and thus the readerly performance of ordering) and literariness.233 He sees its major defect in the “marriage of form to function” (915) since, according to Sternberg, both narrative temporal order (= representationalist dimension) and disorder (= performative dimension) can fulfil a variety of literary functions. Furthermore, insofar as literariness is a flexible concept, which changes according to socio-historical

of stories that form an already integrated part of the self seems to have rather a representationalist design and serves rather the function of stabilising a narratively configured identity. 230 “If there was a plot that produced a definite identity of an individual or a group, or a superplot comprising all plots, we would be done with all [narrative] practices: the subject would be a prisoner of its own image, identity would become frozen” (translation mine). 231 Nonetheless, it seems to me that representationalist theories of narrativity tend to consider non-literary, pragmatic forms of storytelling as prototypical instances of narrativity (see, e.g., Ricœur 1985, 22; Bres 1994, 68; Fludernik 1996, 313, 332, 356). Richardson’s (2006; 2015) highly performative approach, by contrast, is based rather on a literary (modern or postmodern) corpus. Sternberg’s (1992; 2006; 2010) approach, which combines representational and performative dimensions, is, in my view, especially well suited to the analysis of a literature that is not too “high”, experimental or inconsistent. It would be a worthy enterprise to examine the correlations that exist between the representationalist versus performative bias of a theory and the corpus of narrative texts on which the respective theory is built. 232 Despite his popularity, Genette has a somewhat difficult standing today in narratology. While Sternberg (1990) reproaches him for focusing one-sidedly on (temporal) disorder, Gibson (1996, 5) attacks him for his too orderly, “geometric” approach to narrative. 233 As Sternberg puts it, “breaking time counts as making art, chronological ill-formedness (discontinuity, ambiguity) equals aesthetic well-formedness” (1990, 913).

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contexts and communities (see section 3.2), one cannot establish a 1:1 correspondence between literariness and specific generic (either representationalist or performative) forms.234 It should be noted, however, that not only the contrast between “highly literary” and non-literary, pragmatically situated narratives provides (theories of) narrativity with a judgmental dimension; also the conceptualisation of narrativity in terms of more or less “prototypical” instances of narrative implies an evaluative dimension. Each theory of narrativity is based on a certain corpus of texts, be it “high” literature, fiction, historical narrative or conversational storytelling (or a combination thereof).235 As a consequence, differences in definitions of narrativity can be deduced from the corpus that underlies the respective approach and from what is considered as the “prototypical” narrative. What is a “prototypical”, “good” or “ideal” narrative? What counts as scarcely narrative, existing at the lower threshold of narrativity as a “bad” or very atypical narrative?236 Ryan is one of the theorists who build their approach on prototypicality: We may in fact question the need for a watertight definition: why couldn’t narrativity be a scalar property rather than a strictly binary one, and narrative a fuzzy set allowing different degrees of membership, but centered around prototypical cases that everybody recognizes as narrative? In a scalar conception of narrative, definition becomes a series of

234 “Given the variety of features defined or valued as literary, including their ups and downs over the ages, it becomes as gratuitous to contrast literature with historiography as to equate it with fiction” (Sternberg 1990, 925). 235 Fludernik (1996), for example, bases her approach on oral conversational storytelling and expands it so that it includes fiction and modern and high literature, but she marginalises historical narratives. Historical narratives, by contrast, are included for example by Sternberg (1990) and White (1996). Richardson’s (2006; 2015) approach, by contrast, focuses on fiction and high literature. 236 While prototypicality as such admittedly does not imply a judgmental evaluation of quality, researchers indeed tend to equate low or high degrees of narrativity with high or rather low quality narratives. Consider, for example, Prince’s statement: “There is [. . .] a widespread agreement about the fact that different narratives have different degrees of narrativity, that some are more narrative than others, as it were, and ‘tell a better story’” (1982, 145). Also Todorov’s definition of narrative via a “disequilibrium” is claimed to apply (only) to “ideal narratives” (see Todorov 1977, 111). Herman (2002), for his part, combines definitional and evaluative dimensions as he identifies the upper and lower thresholds of narrativity with boredom (i.e. with boring and thus bad narratives) and cognitive overload (i.e. with increased strain and thus bad narratives). Boredom develops when “stereotypicality outstrips remarkableness, with canonicity leaving no room for breach”, while cognitive overload arises in narratives that purposively set “so many diverse, even conflicting, scripts into play that processors [. . .] find themselves unable to structure oversaturated sequences into coherent, narratively organized wholes” (Herman 2002, 103).

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concentric circles that spell increasingly narrow conditions, as we move from the outer to the inner circles, and from the marginal cases to the prototypes. (Ryan 2006, 193, emphasis mine)

As the italicised expressions clearly show, Ryan’s definition in terms of prototypicality implies a spatial-metaphorical imagery: prototypical members of a category are in the centre while atypical cases exist at the margins of the sphere of prototypicality. This spatial imagery corresponds to Lotman’s cultural theory according to which all semiotic cultural processes can be conceptualised as (dynamic) “semiospheres” whose centre is constituted by highly appreciated and accepted entities and whose periphery houses marginalised and rather devaluated phenomena. Lotman’s theory can be applied in different ways to narrativity. On the one hand, one can conceptualise narrativity as a sphere, constituted of less narrative margins (atypical periphery) and a very “narrative” centre (of prototypicality). On the other hand, definitions of narrativity can themselves be analysed according to their “spatial” position: some definitions constitute the accepted centre of the sphere of narratology, while others are less accepted and exist therefore at the periphery of narratology. If it is true that representationalist definitions have been dominant during structuralism, while performative definitions currently are becoming more and more common and accepted, then we are witness to a dynamics that is taking place in the narratological semiosphere, not unlike “the victory of a semiotic system [. . .] shifting to the centre” (Lotman 2001, 141). Lotman’s theory also claims that semiotic processes are triggered by an asymmetry, i.e. by the clash of two asymmetrical codes. Within the sphere of narratology, the representationalist and the performative can be understood as two such codes, which clash and fight for predominance in the narratological semiosphere. Lotman (see 76) has identified two further semiotic codes, which clash in narratology as well, namely the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic.

2.3.7 The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic The paradigmatic and the syntagmatic have been theorised differently by various theorists and in quite different scientific domains and contexts.237 On a very general level, this conceptual pair expresses the opposition between horizontal

237 See, for example, the enormous differences between Chambers’s (1994), Kuhn’s (1996) and Lotman’s (1977) ideas of what constitutes a paradigm.

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and vertical modes of organisation, the former being associated with sequentiality, linearity, textuality and temporality, the latter with lists, categories, visualpictorial modes, spatiality and semantic relations (e.g. of similarity, contrast or hierarchical ordering).238 The opposition has its roots in linguistics, where these two axes are still considered to be fundamental aspects of language as a sign system (see Aitchison 1992, Clément 2005, Glück 2005 and McGregor 2009, 8–11). It denotes two kinds of relations between linguistic signs. A syntagm is a group of two or more linguistic units that occur within the same construction so as to form a sequence (horizontal axis). Linguistic signs stand in a paradigmatic relationship to each other if they can replace each other at the same position of a syntagm. A paradigm thus denotes a class or category on one of the multiple levels of a sign system (vertical axis) and is related to “the notion that each sign invokes a contrast with other signs that might have been used instead” (McGregor 2009, 10). The relationship between the two axes has often been theorised as an interplay, both in literary and in narrative theory. But this interplay can be understood very differently, depending on the textual or extra-textual level that is taken into consideration. In literary theory, Jakobson (1988) links the concept of literariness to the opposition of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic insofar as he claims that the “poetic function”, which dominates five further functions in literary texts, “projects the principle of equivalence from the [paradigmatic, ESW] axis of selection into the [syntagmatic, ESW] axis of combination” (1988, 39, orig. emphasis). In other words, there is a “projection of the equational principle into the sequence”, a “superposition of similarity upon contiguity” (50–51, emphasis mine).239 For Roland Barthes, the interplay of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic is fundamental for an understanding of the “complexity” of “the system of narrative” (1975, 266, 269). “[D]ystaxy240 initiates a ‘horizontal’ reading, while integration superimposes on it a ‘vertical’ reading. [. . .] Through the concurrent use of these two dimensions, structure branches out, proliferates” (270). Concerning 238 The considerations that I offer in this subchapter have been published, to a great extent, in Wagner (2017). 239 Veel draws attention to Jakobson’s essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” from 1956 in which Jakobson relates the axes of syntagmatic combination and paradigmatic selection to metonymy and metaphor, which manifest the dual nature of language (see Veel 2009, 17–19). 240 According to Barthes, dystaxy “occurs as soon as the signs (of a linguistic message) are no longer juxtaposed, as soon as the linear (logical) order is disturbed (for instance, the predicate preceding the subject)” (1975, 266). He adds that “that is exactly what happens in the narrative: the units of a sequence may [. . .] be separated from each other by the insertion of units from other sequences” (266).

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part-whole relationships, Barthes asserts that “the unit is claimed by the whole, yet on the other hand, the narrative ‘hangs together’ only through the distortion and irradiation of its units” (267), the units being distributed on different levels. Despite significant differences, Barthes’s reflections have much in common with Dancygier’s (2012b) approach. The two models analyse “the language of narrative” (Barthes 1975, 266) and rely on the idea of processual, ascending integration. Barthes’s ideas prefigure, in a way, a narrative blending theory when he explains that, in the process of “integration”, “what has been disjoined at a certain level [. . .] is joined together again at a higher level” (269). The two theories identify basic narrative units, which rest on different narrative levels, and which, through complex interactive dynamics, produce a global coherence found at the highest level of the narrative hierarchy. A paradigmatic axis is present in these models as a hierarchy or web of narrative units or spaces; a syntagmatic axis is represented by the conceptually integrated, sequentially configured story that results from dynamics of integration. Also Lotman’s (1977) approach accounts for both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic aspects of narrativity, but from a very different perspective. The transgression of a spatial boundary by the protagonist of a story represents, on the one hand, a syntagmatic, temporal development on the level of the story; but since the two spaces that are separated by the boundary represent two cultural-semantic orders, the transgression is also paradigmatic: the character enters a new space whose semantics contrast with that of her/his homeland.241 There are considerable overlaps between Lotman’s and Greimas’s theories. The two theorists identify two kinds of textual models: one that affirms a specific axiological order (Lotman’s [1977, 355] “texts without plot”; Greimas’s [1966a, 212] “modèle constitutionnel”) and one that introduces an ideological change (Lotman’s “texts with plot”; Greimas’s “modèle transformationnel”). This brings Greimas’s parcours génératif (see section 2.3.4) close to Lotman’s ideas about the structure of the artistic text inasmuch as Greimas’s “deep-structural” semantic orders find an equivalence in Lotman’s cultural, spatio-semantic order. Greimas’s discoursive surface level, for its part, can be aligned with the dynamics of transgression claimed by Lotman. Il nous paraît possible, en généralisant peut-être trop, de grouper ce genre de récits en deux grandes classes: les récits de l’ordre présent accepté; les récits de l’ordre présent refusé. Dans le premier cas, le point de départ réside dans la constatation d’un certain ordre existant et dans le besoin de justifier, d’expliquer cet ordre. L’ordre qui existe, et qui dépasse l’homme parce qu’il est un ordre social ou naturel [. . .] se trouve expliqué au

241 See chapter 3.

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niveau de l’homme: la quête, l’épreuve sont des comportements humains ayant instauré tel ou tel ordre. La médiation du récit consiste à ‘humaniser le monde’, à lui donner une dimension individuelle et événementielle. Le monde se trouve justifié par l’homme, l’homme intégré dans le monde. (Greimas 1966a, 213)242

Considering the conceptual pair of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, one could thus say that, for Greimas, the syntagmatic, which manifests itself in discourse, consists of an anthropomorphic actualisation of paradigmatic semantic-semiotic deep structures, which structure both cognition and culture. While, in these approaches, the two axes seem to complement each other through their interplay, other theories treat them rather as rival candidates for narrativity. Of course, the existence of the two axes is not denied since they are linguistic – and cognitive243 – universals. But the search for narrativity implies, for most researchers, the identification of the specific, distinctive features of narrativity, and it is this distinctive quality that researchers tend to find either in the one or the other axis. The vast majority of researchers argue for a narrativity that resides in the syntagmatic, temporal shape of narratives, namely all those who argue that narrativity lives by narrative time(s) (i.e., intra-, extra- or enunciative time), by change(s) of state, teleology, eventfulness or a sequence of basic narrative parts or units. Ricœur’s definition of narrativity even relies on two syntagmatic axes: that inherent in each narrative (emplotment) and that, intertwined with it, of the “history of [narrative] forms” (Ricœur 1985, 29).244 His theory owes much of its popularity to its sharp criticism of the project of narrative semiotics (of Propp, Bremond, Greimas) to dechronologise and relogicise narrative “by subordinating every syntagmatic (and therefore temporal) aspect of narrative to a corresponding paradigmatic (and therefore achronological) aspect” (31). For Ricœur, “semiotics [. . .] only conserves its narrative aspect insofar as it borrows from our prior understanding of narrative” (32), which Ricœur considers to be

242 “It seems possible to us, by generalizing perhaps a little too much, to group this genre of narratives in two large classes: the narrative of the accepted present order, the narratives of the denied present order. In the first case, the point of departure resides in the establishment of a certain existing order and in the need of justifying and explaining that order. The order which exists and goes beyond man because it is a social or natural order [. . .] is explained at the level of man: the quest, the test are human behaviors that have established such and such an order. The mediation of narrative consists in ‘humanizing the world’, in giving it an individual or occurrential dimension. The world is justified by man, man is integrated into the world” (Greimas 1983, 246, orig. emphasis). 243 See, e.g., Mitchell (1980). 244 For Ricœur, the history of narrative forms is the syntagmatic condition for the development of new narrative “paradigms” (see especially Ricœur 1985, 26).

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fundamentally temporal-syntagmatic. Bres agrees with Ricœur’s syntagmatic orientation, but highlights the temporal (“ascending”) dimension of narrative enunciation rather than that of narrative emplotment.245 Warning (2001), for his part, criticises that, since the time of structuralism, narrative theory has been primarily a theory of syntagmatic organisation. Since that time, paradigmatic oppositions, which are constitutive for the story, play a role only to the extent to which they participate in the constitution of a holistic syntagmatic axis that has a beginning, a middle and an end. According to Warning (2001, 176), the notion of narrative has thus been equated with syntagmatic teleology, closure and the control of contingency. This “syntagmatic narrativity” thus refers to a linear, causal, chronological kind of resultative coherence. Warning proposes to add a second, paradigmatic type of narrativity (Erzählen im Paradigma), which may be said to represent a nonlinear type of dynamic coherence. Besides exposing contingency, this “telling in the paradigm” is primarily characterised by “an ana- and cataphorical web of relationships [that develops] on the back of the text sequence” (179, translation mine). Warning’s model thus describes dynamics that invert the direction of integration described by Barthes: the syntagmatic story allows paradigmatic structures of meaning to be discovered. Warning’s paradigmatic narrativity is quite consistent with Frank’s (2005) idea of “spatial form”. In his famous essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, first published in 1945, Frank analyses Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Recherche und Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Spatial form, as he presents it in his analysis of these literary examples, refers to the fact that some novelistic structures cue readers to establish “spatial” relationships (i.e., a paradigmatic kind of coherence246 in terms of a non-sequential, semantic connectedness) between textual units that are separated by the narrative sequence. For example, “the reader is forced to read Ulysses in exactly the same manner as he reads modern poetry – continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements”

245 “La langue ne sert donc pas seulement à l’expression du temps (‘langage du temps’); par son fonctionnement, elle ouvre à une autre temporalité: le ‘temps du langage’, temps opératif, qui se réalise dans l’instant d’opérativité [. . .]” (Bres 1994, 122). 246 The idea of wholeness and closure plays an important role in Frank’s conception of spatial form: “Joyce composed his novel of an infinite number of references and cross-references which relate to one another independently of the time-sequence of the narrative; and before the book fits together into a meaningful pattern, these references must be connected by the reader and viewed as a whole” (Frank 2005, 62, emphasis mine).

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(2005, 64).247 Obviously, Frank makes metaphorical use of the adjective “spatial” in order to highlight the fact that the (paradigmatic) semantic relationships, discovered by the reader, (i) are not temporal in nature, (ii) cut transversally across the time lines of story and discourse and (iii) emerge from the “juxtaposition” (67, 68), i.e. from the direct comparison or connection of syntagmatically remote textual elements (what Barthes calls “dystaxy”, see above). Frank’s terminology, however, has provoked many misunderstandings according to which spatial form would deny the reality of narrative sequence248 and refer to a textual form and not, as I understand Frank’s arguments, to a “spatial” form of reception, which simply goes against the grain of the plot.249 In a later essay, “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflexions in Modern Literature”, Frank (1978) deviates in several regards from his earlier concept of spatial form, rendering it thereby unfortunately more obscure.250 One of the innovations he undertakes is the inclusion of certain forms of discourse into the notion of spatial form, such as “the prereflexive stream of

247 Frank’s idea of spatial form overlaps, in this regard, with Dancygier’s (2012b) idea of the “narrative anchor” (see section 2.3.5). 248 “My point is here that no matter how ‘spatialized’ a world of fiction might aspire to be it cannot in the least dispense with or subordinate sequence, nor can the reader in his apprehension of the work [. . .]” (Sturgess 1992, 134). 249 As Frank explains, for instance, with regard to A la recherche du temps perdu: “Proust forces the reader to juxtapose disparate images of his characters spatially, in a moment of time, so that the experience of time’s passage will be fully communicated to their sensibility” (Frank 2005, 68). 250 I would like to make two observations on this obscurity. Firstly, Frank aligns his “spatial form” with Jakobson’s “set towards the message itself”, although, in my view, there is a significant difference between them. While Jakobson’s “set towards the message itself” is an effect of reception, Frank’s “spatial form” denotes processes and activities of reception. Although it is true that Jakobson takes the readerly establishment of paradigmatic relations into account, he conceives of the syntagmatic as the linearity of discourse. Frank (2005), by contrast, understands the syntagmatic primarily as the temporal axis of the story. Jakobson’s reflections amount to explaining ambiguity, Frank’s do not. Secondly, Frank claims that his idea of spatial form is opposed to the “temporal nature of the narrative medium (language)” (1978, 281). In the earlier article, by contrast, spatial form is opposed to the temporal nature of the story. This shift seems to be due to his conception of literariness according to which an artful use of language has to subvert the syntagmatic order inherent in the verbal medium: “Indeed, it is clear that all through the history of the novel a tension has existed between the linear-temporal nature of its medium (language) and the spatial elements required by its nature as a work of art” (Frank 1978, 283). Sternberg argues, in this context, that Frank, like many others, hypostasises the lack of congruence between the temporalities of story and of discourse. It should be noted, however, that Frank does not base his concept of literariness on the dichotomy of story and discourse time, but on the dichotomy of pragmatic verbal linearity and a non-pragmatic (literary) exploration of the limits of the verbal medium. Sternberg’s criticism of Frank thus misses its target.

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consciousness” (1978, 281). With regard to such “modern”251 innovations of narrative discourse, Frank explains: The increasing spatialization of the novel, as we see, is clearly correlated with the growing preponderance of discours; and spatial form can thus be regarded as a function of the fluctuating historical relations between these two linguistic modes [i.e., of story and discourse, ESW]. (Frank 1978, 288)

This idea of a “fluctuation” between the narrative unfolding of a syntagmatic story line and the “spatial”, paradigmatic subversion of such a syntagmatic order, especially in modernist narratives, prefigures Richardson’s (2015) idea of a “dialectics” between “natural” and “unnatural” narrativity, Herman’s (2013b) idea of a dialectics between “worlding” and “unworlding” the story and Lotman’s (2001)252 analysis of literary history in terms of an alternation between “rhetoric” and “stylistic” epochs. Obviously, many dichotomies converge in the discussion of the relationship of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic: order and disorder, story and discourse, natural and unnatural narratives, realist and postmodern narratives, mimesis and antimimesis, convention and the break of conventions. This convergence points to a consensus, which unifies quite opposed narratological camps. Frank’s proposal to conceive of spatial and temporal form in terms of “fluctuating historical relations” has thus offered – already in 1978 – a consensus that emerges only slowly today and that Sternberg unjustly claims for himself. As he argues, there is an [. . .] equation, current since Formalism, of perceptual estrangement with temporal disarrangement: artistic sjuzhet is disordered, hence defamiliarized, fabula, a la Tristram Shandy. Itself a variant of the anti-chronologism that has always dominated narrative study – as early as in medias res – this formula proves untenable in all its versions and reversions. (Sternberg 2006, 125)

He finally comes to the conclusion – which is quite consistent with Frank’s, Lotman’s and (later) Herman’s and Richardson’s conclusions – that chronology

251 Also Chambers (1994) argues that, especially in modern narratives, the syntagmatic order of the story becomes more and more paradigmatised by the narrative discourse whose disorderly, digressive, descriptive and communicative factors undermine the structure and systematicity of the syntagmatic. What becomes obvious here is the link between two inner boundaries of narrativity (i.e., between two conceptual pairs): story versus discourse and the syntagmatic versus the paradigmatic. 252 See the third chapter of Lotman’s (2001) Universe of the Mind.

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and antichronology (i.e., a dominantly syntagmatic versus paradigmatic order) are two poles, which are dialectically intertwined in the history of narrative forms.253 Veel’s approach ends with the diagnosis of such a “fluctuation” or dialectics of syntagmatic and paradigmatic narrative modes as well. Veel identifies narrativity initially only with the syntagmatic pole and considers the paradigmatic “to lend itself to the aim of transgressing narratives” (2009, 21).254 Adopting Ryan’s (coherence-based, syntagmatic, representationalist) definition of narrative in Narrative Across Media (2004),255 Veel proposes to equate the opposition between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic with the “dichotomy between narrative and non-narrative” (Veel 2009, 23), i.e. between “elements that support the narrative and those that disrupt it” (21) or transgress it. For her, these two poles represent “two types of ordering principles in contemporary culture” (22). She contends that modern information technology, which she considers a “symbolic form” in the sense of Cassirer, provides us with non-narratively organised (paradigmatic) kinds of information (namely the archive/database, the network/hyperlink and the game/computer game). Moreover, she argues that these digital modes of representation have an “impact [. . .] on the development of literary forms and modes of representation” (24). At the end of her study, however, she seems to mitigate her initial understanding of the paradigmatic as the realm of the non-narrative; she contends that the paradigmatic forms of “organising, navigating, and experiencing information” (185) create “a fluctuating field of narrative negotiations which fuels the creative vitality of

253 “Far from violating the norm, the dechronologized sjuzhet [. . .] becomes itself the norm, whose violation in the interests of optimum making strange calls for nothing else than the return to an orderly, fabula-like chronology as the diametric extreme. Figure and ground, breach and routine, ‘device’ and ‘material’: all again change places, only for a time, as always, but here also between the very poles of narrative time” (Sternberg 2006, 201). 254 Veel develops her position primarily out of Lodge’s The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (1977). Two points made in Lodge’s argument are important for her. On the one hand, drawing on Jakobson’s understanding of the syntagmatic axis as metonymy and of the paradigmatic axis as metaphor, Lodge observes that “realist texts subscribe to a metonymic [i.e. syntagmatic, ESW] order, while modernistic texts oppose this and aim to find alternative ways of organising a story through a practice of metaphoric [i.e. paradigmatic, ESW] order [. . .]” (Veel 2009, 20). On the other hand, Lodge claims “that an emphasis on metaphorical or paradigmatic relationships in the discourse leads to a weakening of metonymic or syntagmatic relationships such as contiguity in time and space and cause and effect” (20). 255 For Ryan, narrative is “a mental representation of causally connected states and events that captures a segment in the history of a world and of its members” (2004, 337).

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the novel and makes it respond to the cultural moment and conditions of information processing in which it was conceived” (186, emphasis mine). One way of conciliating the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic consists thus of acknowledging their cross-fertilisation, which gives birth to alternate literary-historical phases and narrative innovations; another way consists of acknowledging their cognitive-epistemological interdependence. For Mitchell, understanding spatial and temporal form as an “antithesis or alternative” (1980, 542) is a fundamental misapprehension since both space and time are epistemologically256 fundamental metaphors,257 which mutually constitute each other. We cannot experience a spatial form except in time; we cannot talk about our temporal experience without invoking spatial measures. Instead of viewing space and time as antithetical modalities, we ought to treat their relationship as one of complex interaction, interdependence, and interpenetration. (Mitchell 1980, 544)

Mitchell’s analysis is highly consistent with theories of embodied cognition, for instance with Sadoski’s and Paivio’s (1994; 2013) “Dual Coding Theory” according to which human cognition functions via “two separate mental systems”, a “verbal” (i.e., sequential, syntagmatic) and a “non-verbal”, pictorial (i.e. spatial, paradigmatic) code. It is also consistent with Fauconnier’s and Turner’s (2002) blending theory, which also takes the interplay of verbal and pictorial stimuli and conceptual inputs into account (see section 3.1.3).258 That people speak and think both in temporal and spatial metaphors also contributes to the confusing diversity of definitions of narrativity since definitions do not only differ with regard to the question whether narrativity is a rather spatial or temporal phenomenon, but also in the way they model their conception of narrativity. Some researchers propose models that have primarily a spatialparadigmatic design, for example Greimas’s “canonical narrative schema” (see

256 Mitchell expresses his “hope of relating the notion of literary or verbal space to the general problem of epistemological structures” (1980, 540–541). 257 “Continuity and sequentiality are spatial images based in the schema of the unbroken line or surface; the experience of simultaneity or discontinuity is simply based in different kinds of spatial images” (Mitchell 1980, 542). He also highlights that, on a non-metaphorical level, reading is indeed a “decoding of a spatial form (the text)” (544). Reading also means to follow “the linear track of the script. And this ‘track’, it must be insisted, is literally a spatial form, and only metaphorically a temporal one” (544). 258 Mitchell and Fauconnier and Turner draw indeed on the same example. Mitchell draws on “clocks and their [spatial] metaphors of circular time” (1980, 542); Fauconnier and Turner hold that “[t]he wristwatch is a material anchor for a fascinating conceptual blend” (2002, 195) where “[o]ne cycle of the Cyclic Day maps onto two cycles the small rotating rod and 24 cycles of the larger one” (196).

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above), Branigan’s (1992, 17) “narrative schema” or Dancygier’s (2012b) model of narrative spaces; others provide verbal formulae that mimic rather the temporalsyntagmatic development of the story, such as Todorov’s threefold schema of disequilibrium, Bremond’s elementary sequence or Prince’s “this happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened and it was related to that” (1982, 149). Still others combine temporal and spatial features. Ryan’s plot network (1991, 160, figure 20), for instance, models both the paradigmatic alternatives of plot developments and the syntagmatic course of story time. Alternative ways of modelling narrativity are thus not necessarily a question of right or wrong; they express rather different (predominantly syntagmatic versus paradigmatic) modes of thinking (or theorising) of the respective researchers. Variation in the methods of theorisation should be noted because it ostensibly contributes to the diversity of definitions.259

2.3.8 Conclusions In Section 2.3, I have tried, on the one hand, to identify some of the boundaries or conceptual oppositions that structure the debate on – and thereby the concept of – narrativity: story versus discourse, mimesis versus antimimesis, text versus reader, dynamics versus schemata, static closure versus dynamic coherency, representationalism versus performativity and the syntagmatic versus the paradigmatic. Admittedly, this list could be completed by further boundaries and I have partly touched on them (e.g. text versus context; narrative versus other text types; narrative versus narrativity; textual versus. transmedial narrativity, etc.). Looking back at this section, I would like to draw six conclusions: Firstly, various dichotomies (or conceptual pairs) that structure the debate on narrativity are, to a certain extent, relative, due to the many ways in which researchers explore the connections between the two terms. For example, all of the researchers know about the opposition of story and discourse; some base their approaches on it (either on one of the terms or on both), others deconstruct

259 My pyramidal model of narrativity (see section 2.4) is, on the one hand, paradigmatic; although it does not offer a taxonomy, it proposes to think of narrativity (metaphorically) as a “space” of dimensions. The spatial outline of this model should allow us to trace the connections rather than the boundaries between different narrative dimensions and definitions. On the other hand, the model also has a syntagmatic dimension, insofar as temporal aspects of narrativity are integrated into the pictorial model (e.g. by means of a vertical and not, as traditionally usual, by means of a horizontal axis).

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the opposition as such and others again explore their interplay. Secondly, the diverse dichotomies have proved to be interconnected among themselves, forming a complex network of interrelations. To give just one example, the distinction of story and discourse, for instance, plays an important role both for the opposite poles of mimesis and antimimesis and for the distinction of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. Thirdly, one can identify a growing consensus within the complex field of opposed narratological theories (see 2.3.7) according to which representationalist and performative aspects co-determine the notion of narrativity, they lead alternately to historical heydays of syntagmatically “closed” (ordered, consistent) and of paradigmatically “open” (disordered, fragmented, broken, etc.) narratives as well as to countless “hybrid” forms. Fourthly, a major problem emerges from this overview. Narrativity is a highly diversified and heterogeneous concept, characterised by internal disorder. I see two sources of this disorder. On the one hand, it is produced by the broad diversity of narrative dimensions and by the various ways in which these dimensions communicate with each other. Considered from this angle, narrativity forms a rhizome – an “assemblage” of diverse dimensions and “strata” – which has many entryways and whose dimensions can be connected in many ways, thus offering many “lines of flight”. On the other hand, this diversity of narrativity meets with the irreducible subjectivity of researchers whose definitions are based (i) on different epistemological (e.g. analytical versus synthetical; syntagmatic versus paradigmatic, etc.) preferences, (ii) on different narrative corpora (e.g., literary versus conversational, verbal versus pictorial versus transmedial narratives), (iii) on divergent research foci (e.g., linguistic versus cognitivist approaches; interest in text, cognition or context; focus on closure versus openness, mimesis versus antimimesis), (iv) on different methods of defining (e.g. taxonomies, prototypes or paradigms; definitional versus meta-definitional approaches) as well as on (v) diverging judgments260 on narrative quality, narrativehood and/or narrativeness. My work on the “inner boundaries” or dichotomies of narrativity has tried to provide the chaos of definitions with some order, but admittedly it cannot account for the broad diversity produced by researcher-related parameters. Nor does it seem to me that the list of dichotomies, despite my sustained attempt to carve out their interconnections, provides the concept with sufficient clarity. This is primarily because, in the present chapter, I have moved through the

260 Chatman (1990) criticises the subjective, judgmental dimension of narrative theory. He examines the concept of tellability, noting that “[t]he hard-won distinction between literary theory and literary criticism seems to vanish, and subjective judgment once again becomes not only the basis for evaluations of works but for definitions of literary concepts and terms” (1990, 324–325).

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rhizome of narrativity (and across/between its boundaries), but not provided a (fixed, coherent) gestalt, which is necessary for a successful understanding. This is my fifth conclusion. If we are to understand narrativity, we are in need of a theoretical gestalt, i.e. of an integrative, holistic model, which covers and locates the broad diversity of narrative dimensions and thereby works against the main deficit of “narrativity”, namely the conceptual chaos that it has come to denote. I accept and will try to meet this challenge in section 2.4 where I propose such a (meta-)gestalt of narrativity. As my sixth and final conclusion, I would like to point to what I consider to be the perhaps most deplorable deficit of narrativity theories so far. They scarcely take account of narrativity as an essentially processual, dynamic phenomenon. As discussed earlier, there are approaches that underline the dynamic side of narrativity, but these approaches tend to consider such dynamics only as a step towards the positive, successful result that truly makes narrativity. Such conceptions of narrativity are based on a form of resultative coherence. Not only the model that I offer in section 2.4, but also my analysis of literary narratives (see Part B of the present study) serves the goal of compensating for this deficit by putting special emphasis on the essentially dynamic aspects of narrativity.

2.4 A new proposal for systematisation: The Pyramid of narrativity 2.4.1 Goals and basics of my integrative model Drawing on the insights gained in the last chapter, I would like to propose in this section an integrative model, which draws a narratological “map” of the concept and phenomenon of narrativity. This map is designed to integrate the various dimensions of narrativity, which have been carved out by earlier definitions of narrativity, into one model. Its main goal is to systematise the concept, that is, to provide the chaotic multitude of definitions of narrativity, of narrative dimensions and inner borderlines with an overarching schema, which is stable, hierarchical, “arborescent” enough to satisfy our261 need for order, but also flexible, dynamic and “rhizomatic” enough to do justice to the variables, metamorphoses, processes and differences that play a role in the constitution of

261 I am referring to us as the “homo ordinans” (see section 1.3).

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narrativity, be it on the side of the semiotic object, on the side of the receiver or on the side of their many contexts. My model of narrativity creates order by locating the different dimensions and stages that (can) contribute to the emergence of narrativity “as a felt quality” (Abbott 2014, 588) during individual processes of reading. My model builds primarily on Wolf’s (2003) insight into the multiplicity of factors (Wolf’s “narratemes”) that partake in the creation of narrativity, but it goes one step further by developing a spatial (i.e. visualised) model or framework (the “Pyramid of narrativity”) in which these narrative factors can be located and connected according to different places and stages of narrativity.262 Pyramid with a capital P refers hereafter to this pyramidal model. At first sight, my model seems to provide a static systematic overview on narrative features insofar as it represents narrative dimensions in a visualised schema. Nonetheless, the model is also suited to embrace dynamic dimensions, especially the temporal dimension of narrativity, which implies (i) story time and discourse time as features of the text, (ii) the time of reading, i.e. the progression of reader response (and its conditions) and (iii) literary-historical developments. The time of (authorial) writing is, like other dimensions of the production of narrative, not focused and visualised, but leastwise implied by my model.263 The space or “map” that I offer has metaphorically the shape of a compartmentalised pyramid264 whose implications will be explored throughout the

262 Wolf’s and my approach differ from each other in several regards, one being the narrative objects under consideration. While Wolf seeks primarily to cover verbal and pictorial narrativity, my approach is oriented towards literary narratives. See my discussion of Wolf in sections 2.4.2 and 2.5.2. 263 See esp. section 2.5.1. 264 The metaphor of the pyramid and the structurally similar metaphor of the iceberg have been used in various ways in literary theory and beyond. Hegel invokes the picture of the pyramid to explain his conception of the sign: “Das Zeichen ist irgendeine unmittelbare Anschauung, die einen ganz anderen Inhalt vorstellt, als sie für sich hat; ― die Pyramide, in welche eine fremde Seele versetzt und aufbewahrt ist” (Hegel 2000, 214, §379, orig. emphasis). Derrida draws on Hegel’s conception in order to explain his différance. The neologistic “a” in différance distinguishes différance from the common word différence (with an e). Drawing on this a, Derrida explains that the difference between the two spellings “se propose par une marque muette, par un monument tacite, je dirai même par une pyramide, songeant [. . .] à tel texte de l’Encyclopédie de Hegel où le corps du signe est comparé à la Pyramide égyptienne” (Derrida 1972, 4). For Barthes (1966), the structure of the récit is constituted by a pyramidal structure: “functions” are hierarchically superordinated in a pyramidal fashion. The spire of this pyramid of functions, constituted by the most encompassing function, “yields to the next level (the level of Actions)” (1975, 255). Linke and Nussbaumer, for their part, use the metaphor of the iceberg in a similar fashion ― not to describe

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chapter. The added value of this pyramidal “map” of narrativity consists not only of its integrative overview of dimensions of narrativity, but, simultaneously, of its ability to “chart” definitions of narrativity. Since most definitions tend to draw quite selectively on only one or a few levels, elements or dimensions of narrativity, their definitional scope can be analysed and visualised in terms of the levels and compartments of the Pyramid. As a map, the Pyramid allows differences between definitional narrativities to be traced back to differences in the way narrative dimensions are included versus excluded, interrelated versus separated, due to the respective research perspectives and interests or “particular set[s] of emphases” (Phelan and Rabinowitz in Herman et al. 2012, 5). The Pyramid thus represents a kind of matrix inside of which idiosyncratic compositional (meta-) narrative and narratological concepts emerge and can be retraced; these concepts can be considered to be narrative and narratological “networks”, which interconnect narrative elements and levels in various ways, inside (and sometimes outside of) the Pyramid of narrativity. As the integrative design of my model suggests, it should do justice to the two terms of each of the dichotomies presented in section 2.3: it is designed to cover story and discourse, mimetic and antimimetic aspects, the text and the reader, static closure and dynamic coherence. Moreover, it should itself be schematic and dynamic, cover representationalist and performative, syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of narrativity and be, by itself, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic.265 To concretise the last point: my model is, on the one hand, “paradigmatic” insofar as it proposes to think of narrativity (metaphorically) as a space of dimensions.266 On the other hand, my model has also a syntagmatic

the constitution of narrative texts, but, more generally, of texts whose covert, inferential or implied meanings lie below the surface: “Der kleine Teil, der über die Wasseroberfläche ragt, der für alle unmittelbar evident ist, das wäre die konventionelle, feste Bedeutung der verwendeten Sprachzeichen. All das, was für die umfassende Deutung der Äußerung, des Textes an zusätzlicher Interpretationsleistung, an zusätzlichen Inferenzen aufgewendet werden muss, das wäre der größere Teil des Eisberges unter der Oberfläche. Dies könnte eine mögliche Fassung sein des Unterschieds von Explizitem und Implizitem. Sie deckt sich mit der verbreiteten Unterscheidung von Semantik und Pragmatik” (2000, 436). 265 The Pyramid thus seeks to apply Deleuze’s and Guattari’s principle of multiplicity and their proposal to replace “est” [is] by “et” [and]. See section 1.5. 266 I am picking up the connection between the paradigmatic and the spatial, which has been proposed by Lotman (2010, 109) in an (unnumbered) figure, which distinguishes two types of sign. Curiously, in the English translation (2001, 77), the hyperonyms “syntagm” and “paradigm”, which summarise the two bundles of contrastive features in the German edition, are lacking. – The meta-definitional approaches examined above (see section 2.1) also have a paradigmatic design insofar as they define narrativity via a taxonomy, a bundle of definitional classes or categories. My spatial model, by contrast, should lend itself to the tracing of connections rather than to

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dimension, insofar as temporal aspects of narrativity are integrated into the spatial-metaphorical model.267 Understanding the Pyramid requires, furthermore, acknowledging the following aspects: (1) its systemic design; (2) its circulatory design; (3) its principle of “zoomability”; (4) its anthropological (un)ground (see section 2.4.9); and (5) its limits and blind spots (see section 2.5). I will explore each of these fundamental aspects, which specify, complement or restrict the scope of the Pyramid, throughout the whole chapter. Before I begin to present my model, I would like to address two important questions concerning the relationship between the Pyramid and the Babylonian Tower of narrativity. (i) Where is the Pyramid located: at the first, second or third level of the Babylonian Tower? (ii) If I do research on the diversity of narrativities created by narratology – thus practising what I previously called meta-narratology –, how can I hope not to add a new layer to the diachronic pile of definitions and meta-definitions? My model makes an effort to merge all three levels of the Babylonian Tower such that a unified notion of narrativity emerges. The Pyramid of narrativity (and especially the order offered by its internal structure) surely cannot avoid being a meta-definitional approach, which somehow heightens the Babylonian Tower. Nonetheless, the Pyramid aims to transform the chaotic, diachronically growing “Babylonian Tower” of narrativity into a systematic theoretical framework. New definitions of narrativity (and the dimensions highlighted by them) can be systematically located, interconnected and integrated into the pyramidal model. If the Babylonian Tower is a chaotic pile of definitions, which grows diachronically, the Pyramid extracts the basic dimensions of narrativity from the Babylonian Tower and integrates them into a synchronic, pyramidal configuration, which is open for and connectable to new narrative dimensions and

the drawing of boundaries between different narrative dimensions and definitions. This provides my model with its rhizomatic quality, according to the very first principle of the rhizome: the principle of connection (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 7). 267 The temporal dimension, however, is represented in my model primarily by a vertical axis as well as by its circular design and not, as is usually the case, by a syntagmatic axis. This is because my model focuses on processes of reception; the syntagmatic axis of narrative texts (as well as its paradigmatic counterparts) is implied, in my model, by the “textual system”.

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narratological definitions. The pyramidal “map” thus offers a theoretical design that is able to both cover and analyse earlier definitions. It thus collapses or levels the distinctions, visualised in the Babylonian Tower, between narrativity (narrative essence), narrativities (definitions and concepts of narrativity) and meta-narrativities (accounts of definitions of narrativity). Concerning the ontology of narrativity, the Pyramid is therefore, in compliance with Deleuze’s philosophy,268 flat or heterarchical insofar as its elements, dynamics and dimensions are simply narrative in nature; narratological and meta-narratological definitions can be understood as ordered selections and combinations of some of the various narrative dimensions that are mapped out by the Pyramid. The hierarchical shape of the Pyramid does not contradict its ontological flatness since it simply visualises stages in the emergence of narrativity; it displays narrativity’s performative (dynamic, temporal, interactional) dimension. Concerning the ontological elements and dimensions of narrativity, the Pyramid seeks to be as neutral and encompassing as possible; this restraint serves to create a model that is able to cover both narrative and narratological “multiplicity” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense). The fundament (i.e. the basic level) of the Babylonian Tower of narrativity is, of course, not directly accessible since no narratologist, I include myself here too, can leave the meta-position (i.e., abolish the theoretical stance) from which every researcher approaches her/his object of research.269 In other words, narrativity cannot be found as a Kantian “thing-in-itself”; the identification of narrative dimensions is always a narratological act. From this point of view, my model is no more able to grasp the “essence” of our object of research than any other approach. I consider the essence of narrativity to reside in the dialectical interaction of its virtuality and actuality, as understood by Deleuze and Parnet: L’actuel est le complément ou le produit, l’objet de l’actualisation, mais celle-ci n’a pour sujet que le virtuel. L’actualisation appartient au virtuel. L’actualisation du virtuel est la singularité, tandis que l’actuel lui-même est l’individualité constituée.270 (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 180–181)

268 As Askin puts it, “[. . .] Deleuze proposes a fundamentally flat and anarchic ontology” (Askin 2015, 157). 269 But there may exist a “vicious” circle between the level of research and the level of the object of research (see Wagner 2017). 270 “The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but the virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 149–150).

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In my understanding, the virtual refers to all narrative possibilities as they are given by the interplay of possible (“tellable”) realities, narrative texts, contexts, receivers and ways of receiving; it therefore includes all possible narrative dimensions and all possible ways of theorising these dimensions. The actual, by contrast, refers to realisations of these possibilities – to particular narrative texts, readers, readings, contexts, experiences and concepts of narrativity. Narrativity, as I conceive of it, lives both by this unsurmountable opposition between the actual and the virtual and by what connects the two ontological domains, that is, by processes of actualisation. It is these processes of actualisation by which “the actual” (the individuality of narratives and narrativities) comes into existence; it is by processes of actualisation that readers make narrative experiences and seek to make sense of narrative texts. In a similar way, narratologists actualise narrative dimensions as they integrate them into their models and definitions, thus transforming the virtual space of narrativity into actual narratological orders. The virtual thus covers everything narrative that is possible; it thus pertains to the realm of the universal. The actual, by contrast, can be understood as particular manifestations of virtual possibilities; it thus pertains to what is specific and subjective (see section 2.2). The Pyramid of narrativity as such (see Figure 6a) pertains, on the one hand, to the domain of the actual, since it offers a particular narratological order. Nonetheless, it aims to take account of the dialectical relationship of the virtual and the actual, and that by two means. On the one hand, it integrates (i) the virtual, (ii) processes of actualisation and (iii) the actual of narrativity into the pyramidal design. On the other hand, the Pyramid itself is ontologically a hybrid of actual and virtual dimensions. It is actual to the extent to which it maps out particular narrative elements, levels, dimensions and processes.271 But it is also virtual insofar as it is designed as a space of possibilities. Various narrative and narratological orders, constellations and processes can become “actualised” within its ontologically flat shape. The Pyramid itself does not actualise them – it provides only a virtual space in which multiple actualisations can manifest themselves. Like any rhizome, the Pyramid of narrativity has no centre (for example, of prototypical or necessary features), but “any point [. . .] can be connected to anything other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 7). Pyramidal narrativity is the virtual space from and in which various narrativities can emerge.

271 This includes, paradoxically, the Deleuzian orders of the virtual, of actualisation and of the actual.

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Figure 6a: The Pyramid of narrativity.

2.4.2 Three stages of narrativity and its terminological origins In order to systematise the diversity of dimensions, I propose distinguishing three kinds of narrativity (plus a “phenomenal summit”) within the Pyramid.272 These narrativities are represented as three levels or stages (virtual narrativity, narrativity in actualisation, resultative narrativity), which should denote three ontological as well as temporal states of narrativity. Before I elaborate on these aspects of the Pyramid, I would like to explain shortly my terminology, which is not only based on Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual (see above). It has also been inspired by Bremond’s (1966) well-known threefold séquence élémentaire (“elementary sequence”). After a short summary of Bremond’s concept, I will explain my adaptation of his terminology.

272 A more detailed account of the levels of pyramidal narrativity will be given below (see sections 2.4.4–2.4.8).

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Bremond “draws a map” as well, but another one than I, namely that “of logical possibilities of narrative as a preliminary to any description of a specific literary genre” (1980, 387). For him, particular narratives and narrative genres are complex configurations. There is a basic universal structure and logic of possibilities at the core of these configurations, which he aims to theorise. Following Propp’s model and especially the idea of the narrative function as the basic sequential unit of any narrative,273 Bremond identifies “three obligatory phases of any process” (387). These phases refer to the action sequences performed by agents in the diegetic world, as they are narrated by a narrator: Cette triade correspond aux trois phases obligées de tout processus: a) une fonction qui ouvre la possibilité du processus sous forme de conduite à tenir ou d’événement à prévoir; b) une fonction qui réalise cette virtualité sous forme de conduite ou d’événement en acte; c) une fonction qui clôt le processus sous forme de résultat atteint. (Bremond 1966, 60, orig. emphasis)274

Briefly, for Bremond, narrative discourse is governed by a three-fold logic of possibilities according to which the plot develops through the stages of virtuality, actualisation and result. His model is a theory of possibilities insofar as “none of these functions lead necessarily to the following function in the sequence” (1980, 387): virtuality (e.g., “a goal to be obtained”) creates a point of bifurcation inasmuch as it either leads to actualisation (e.g., to an “act necessary to attain [the] goal”) or is left unactualised (e.g. in the form of “inertia, impediment to action”, 388). The stage of actualisation, for its part, creates a further point of bifurcation, since it can either produce a positive result (“Goal attained”) or a negative result (“Goal not attained”, 388). Bremond considers narrative to be a “network” (389) insofar as elementary sequences “combine so as to produce complex sequences [. . .] according to variable configurations” (388).275 According to Bremond, narra-

273 “First, the basic unit, the narrative atom, is still the function, applied as in Propp, to actions and events which, when grouped in sequences, generate the narrative” (Bremond 1980, 387). 274 “This triad corresponds to the three obligatory phases of any process: a function which opens the process in the form of an act to be carried out or of an event which is foreseen; a function which achieves this virtuality in the form of an actual act or event; and a function which closes the process in the form of an attained result” (Bremond 1980, 387). 275 Bremond presents three of “the most typical” configurations: “end-to-end series” (1980, 388), “the enclave” (389) and “coupling” (389). He also identifies “two basic types” of the events of a given narrative, namely sequences of “amelioration” and of “degradation” (390).

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tions imitate the narrative structure of real-life experience, characterised by goaldirected reflections and actions.276 Although I borrow from Bremond’s terminology, our theories have a very different scope and design. Insofar as Bremond’s approach identifies a structure inherent in the narrative object, namely in story and discourse,277 his model is primarily located, within my pyramidal model, in the textual (semiotic) subsystem.278 If I use Bremond’s terminology, it is not in order to adopt his plot-related theory, but only in order to pick up the less specific concepts of virtuality, actualisation and result. I do not apply them, however, to the plot development, but, within the Pyramid, to stages of the readerly reception of narratives. Before narrative processing starts, narrativity exists only in a state of virtuality, understood as the possibilities and conditions of narrative processing that are given by the (co-presence of the) text (i.e., semiotic object) and the reader (i.e., the recipient). As soon as the interaction between these two entities begins, the possibilities, present in a state of virtuality, can be actualised. If this happens, the ontological state of virtual narrativity is transformed into narrativity in actualisation, which refers to goal-directed processes of understanding,279 oriented towards the goal of constituting narrative meaning. The interim stage on the way to that goal are processes that aim at creating a coherent narrative structure, schema or gestalt; this goal can be achieved or not. If readers succeed in creating a consistent, cognitive-interpretive model or meaning of the narrative text, they reach the resultative stage of narrativity, which indeed “closes the process in the form of an attained result” (Bremond 1980, 387). My concepts of virtuality, actualisation and result thus share with Bremond’s theory a logic of possibilities: readers can engage in (more or less) intense processes of narrative reading, understanding and meaning-making (narrativity in actualisation), or they can refuse or interrupt these processes – then the Pyramid is not completely erected. If readers interact with the text and are successful in their search for coherence and meaning, they create a narrative gestalt

276 “When man, in real life, maps out a plan, explores in his mind the possible developments of a situation, reflects on the course of action undertaken, remembers the phases of a past event, he forms the first narrations of which we can conceive. [. . .] Thus to the elementary narrative types correspond the most general forms of human behavior” (Bremond 1980, 406). 277 “All narrative consists of a discourse which integrates a sequence of events of human interest into the unity of a single plot” (Bremond 1980, 390). 278 Here applies the principle of zoomability: if we zoom into the text, we find several textual levels, inter alia those of story and discourse (see section 2.4.5). 279 See chapter 3.

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(resultative narrativity) and experience narrative meaning. Or their search can fail, then they reach neither the ontological stage of resultative narrativity nor the phenomenal summit of meaning. In this regard, virtuality, actualisation and result are ontological stages of narrativity, situated on a “vertical” axis of temporal processing.

2.4.3 The vertical axis of temporal processing Narrativity, as I conceive of it, is bound to the reader’s temporal processing of the text (or semiotic object), that is, to “narrative progression”.280 Correspondingly, a narrative is considered, as Baroni (2007, 50) puts it, as “un texte procédurale”, that is, as a text that lives by a temporally extended process of reception.281 This dynamic concept of narrativity is an important ingredient of the concept of the narrative configuration (see Pier 2004). According to Mink, in the configurational comprehension of a story which one has followed, the end is connected with the promise of the beginning as well as the beginning with the promise of the end, and the necessity of the backward references cancels out, so to speak, the contingency of the forward references. To comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once [. . .]. (Mink 1970, 554, orig. emphasis)

The interplay of prospective and retrospective activities during the act of reading has been theorised in terms of “entertainment” (see Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982), of narrative “tension” (see Baroni 2007; 2009) or, respectively, of “suspense”, “curiosity” and “surprise” (see Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982; Baroni 2007; 2009; Sternberg 1992; 2006; 2010) as well as in terms of what Barthes calls the “hermeneutic”282 and

280 “The term ‘narrative progression’ identifies the movement of narrative as the synthesis of two dynamic systems, one governing a narrative’s internal logic as it unfolds from beginning through middle to end, and the other governing the developing interests and responses of the audience to that unfolding” (Phelan 2005, 359). 281 Baroni (2009, 10) invokes in this context Sartre’s emphasis of the dynamic nature of the literary object: “l’objet littéraire est une étrange toupie, qui n’existe qu’en movement. Pour la faire surgir, il faut un acte concret qui s’appelle la lecture, et elle ne dure qu’autant que cette lecture peut durer ” (Sartre 1975, 52). 282 The “hermeneutic code” overlaps with the phenomenon of curiosity (and surprise), as analysed by Sternberg (1992; 2006; 2010). Barthes does not provide clear-cut definitions of his five codes, but he describes the notion of the hermeneutic code inter alia as follows: “Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed” (Barthes 2000, 19; see also 17).

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the “proairetic”283 “code”.284 What is at stake here is the (inter)sequentiality of plot (and discourse), including its effects; it is linked to the question of closure, i.e., to the reader’s (more or less successful) attempts to provide story and/or discourse with a configurative meaning.285 Closure plays an important role, for example, in Ricœur’s narrative configuration, which is based on the idea of emplotment, understood as a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (Ricœur 1984, 158). As Pier (2004, 242) has underlined, Ricœur’s narrative configuration implies both “sequence” (i.e., a chronological dimension) and “pattern” (i.e. the synthetic-paradigmatic transformation of sequentiality into a meaningful whole). Narrative progression thus requires both “syntagmatic” (sequential) and “paradigmatic” (e.g. thematic) processes of meaning-making, often referred to as (the readerly establishment of) a web of “ana- and cataphorical” relationships (see e.g. Warning 2001, 179). For Pier (2004), narrative configurations represent interpretative acts, which are induced by the textual signs that constitute individual narratives.286 If narrativity resides in configurational acts, which take place during the act of reading, does this mean that narrativity ends as soon as the process of reading is finished? In other words, does narrativity denote the process of configuring or its result? According to Sturgess, narrativity can only be ascribed to dynamic processes of meaning-making: [. . .] the full understanding of narrativity at any one stage of a narrative will always be subject to a process of ‘deferment’ until the next stage has been attended to. And so on until the work’s narrativity ceases to function. Indeed, when considering narrativity the idea of deferment operates both prospectively and retrospectively. (Sturgess 1992, 129, emphasis mine)

283 The “proairetic” code can be aligned with Sternberg’s “suspense”; it refers to the reader’s interest in the development of the story. This code takes account of “the ability rationally to determine the result of an action, we shall name this code of actions and behavior proairetic” (Barthes 2000, 18). 284 “The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures [. . .] [E]ach code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven” (Barthes 2000, 20–21). 285 Kafalenos has highlighted the impact that sequential presentation and reception has on interpretation: “Because of the effects of sequential perception on the configuration one establishes, and of the configuration on interpretation, any sequentially perceived representation of sequential events – any narrative – (necessarily, unavoidably) shapes interpretations of the events it represents” (1999, 54). 286 “Rather than an abstractive or reductive set of procedures for determining the core structure of a given narrative, much less the formal characteristics of all narratives or of particular classes of narratives, narrative configurations result from the interpretative acts elicited by the textual signs of individual narratives” (Pier 2004, 263–264).

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Roland Barthes (1966, 6) defends a similar position: “le sens n’est pas ‘au bout’ du récit, il le traverse.”287 I share the view that processes of configuring (i.e. coherence in progress288 and thus narrativity in actualisation) represent the core of narrativity. Nonetheless, as the Pyramid suggests, also the states that precede and follow these processes of consistency-building (namely virtuality and result) form a part of narrativity.289 That narrativity has a temporal, procedural dimension is hardly being disputed,290 and this dimension of narrative progression is represented in the Pyramid by its vertical axis of orientation. While the “virtual” level of the pyramid denotes the starting conditions that precede the creation of narrativity (i.e., the state before the narrative processing starts), the highest (“phenomenal”) level of the Pyramid refers to a mental state that can both accompany and follow from narrative processing, but that primarily represents its goal: the constitution of meaning. The second highest level (of resultative narrativity) denotes the (possible, successful) result of readerly processes of configuration; it denotes the narrative gestalt or schema itself (that is, the kind of order developed) rather than a phenomenal effect of meaning. The intermediate level (of “actualisation”), by contrast, refers to the processes of narrative reception themselves, that is, to online dynamics of reading, consistency-building and understanding, which work towards the creation of a narrative gestalt and meaning.

2.4.4 Pyramidal dynamics and the circulatory design Before I elaborate on the different levels of pyramidal narrativity, I need to highlight two limits of the metaphor of the pyramid, and especially of its levels or “plateaux”.291 First, the stratification of the pyramid is countered by rhizomatic movements and interconnections between its plateaux. This includes the

287 “The meaning does not lie ‘at the end’ of the narrative, but straddles it” (Barthes 1975, 243). 288 See section 2.3.5 and chapter 3. 289 More precisely, they represent the virtual and realised parts of narrativity (see below). 290 Even theorists of “inherency”, as Abbott (2014) calls them, take this temporal dimension into consideration. Greimas is often inadequately summarised as someone who restricts himself to the analysis of atemporal deep structures. But his theory also takes the sequential, diachronic dimension of narratives into consideration: “[. . .] l’épreuve, considérée comme expression figurative du modèle transformationnel, introduit une dimension diachronique qui, tout en opposant les contenus axiologiques investis dans les structures qui la précèdent et qui la suivent, rend compte en même temps de leur transformation” (Greimas 1966a, 212). 291 I am alluding to Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille plateaux whose “plateaux” or layers are equally subject to processes of “destrafication”: “Dans un livre comme dans toute chose, il y a

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skipping of levels,292 interpretative movements in the opposite direction (from the top towards the ground)293 and recursive loops (see Figure 6b). Especially the recursive loop plays an important role in my pyramidal model. If the processing of texts has to be understood as proceeding in cycles294 (i.e., to put it simply, as an ongoing modification and enrichment of an emerging narrative gestalt, the latter being complete only at the end of the reading process), then reading means producing successively, during reception, a host of “realised narrativities” (narrative schemata) and “meanings”, which become enriched and/or modified during repeated processes of actualisation. Narrative schemata (located on the third pyramidal level) are continuously (recursively) reinserted into the level of “virtual narrativity” inasmuch as new knowledge about the text becomes immediately one of the conditions of its further processing. Each narrative gestalt, which is developed during reading (e.g. a cognitive representation of a character, of the setting, of a conflict), thus undergoes new cycles of “narrativity in actualisation” (narrative dynamics) resulting in new mental models – and so forth, until the reading process is finished.

des lignes d’articulation ou de segmentation, des strates, des territorialités; mais aussi des lignes de fuite, des mouvements de déterritorialisation et de déstratification” (1980, 9–10). 292 An example would be interpretative dealings with difficult modern or postmodern texts that do not lend themselves to the creation of an unambiguous narrative gestalt or schema. Resultative coherence can, in some cases, hardly be achieved. In such cases, it can happen, for instance, that interpreters jump directly from narrativity in actualisation to the phenomenal summit of narrativity (narrative meaning) without producing resultative narrativity, that is, a coherent narrative schema. In other words, they ascribe meaning to a narrative despite unresolved problems of interpretation. Camus, for instance, notes with regard to Kafka: “It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing” (1963, 155, note 1). Camus provides the notorious interpretative openness of Kafka’s work – i.e. its resistance against closure on the level of resultative narrativity – with meaning by ascribing a literary-aesthetic value to it. See my considerations on the strategy of the “interpretative ascent” (chapter 6). 293 This happens, for instance, when readers process what Jahn (1999) calls “garden-path sentences” ― “a type of sentence that traps the reader in a processing failure and requires an act of reanalysis to recuperate its actual structure and meaning” (1999, 169). What is at stake here are sentences that are initially transformed, with little effort, into a meaningful gestalt, which then proves to be inappropriate. As a result, readers have to descend back, from the level of narrative gestalt to the level of narrative dynamics. Such a movement “downwards” in the Pyramid is not restricted to the level of sentences, but can also occur on the level of textual macro-structures; this happens, for instance, when the discourse reveals facts about the diegetic past that prove the recipient’s schema of diegetic facts and events wrong (the phenomenon of surprise). It also plays an important role in narrative reframing, a technique that is important for understanding Kafka’s narrativity (see section 5.4.10). 294 See chapter 3.

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Figure 6b: Rhizomatic dynamics of the Pyramid of narrativity.

Although this dynamics of circulation is, on a metaphorical level, inconsistent with the image of a pyramid,295 it represents one of the most important aspects of my pyramidal model, referred to above as the pyramid’s “circulatory design”.296 The principle of circularity, however, does not only apply to circular dynamics of reading, that is, to the way in which newly created representations of narrative structures and meanings participate in “top-down” processes. It

295 What becomes obvious here is the fact that the metaphor of the pyramid has its limits – like every metaphor. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have convincingly pointed out, metaphors illuminate certain aspects of the state of affairs and hide others. The metaphor of the pyramid is not well consistent with the idea of circular dynamics. My model is, however, expressively designed to combine the metaphors of the pyramid and of circulation. 296 See section 2.4.1. My model is, in this regard, consistent with a central concern of rhetorical narrative theory, which identifies “feedback loops among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response” (Phelan and Rabinowitz in Herman et al. 2012, 5). I will elaborate further below on the role that the author plays in narrativity (see section 2.5.1).

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also draws on the holistic narrativities of entire semiotic objects (e.g. the narrativity of this or that novel, as homo- or heterogeneous it may be perceived), which are received not only by individual recipients, but also, on a larger scale, by a literary or cultural community. Narrativities find entrance into cultural memory, into the “archive” of narratives, and become part of the conditions both of the production and reception of new narratives. I conceive of this circular process metaphorically as a kind of cultural “sedimentation” (see Koschorke 2012) of past narrativities, which provide a fertile soil for the cultural growth of new narratives. The Pyramid is, in this regard, consistent with Askin’s idea of a “double movement of both germination in the virtual nether region of human experience and reason, and its redoubling descent in to this very region once constituted as the actual product of this process” (2015, 159). The Pyramid allows for the distinction between these two kinds of narrative circularity (that is, reading cycles and cultural cycles) by means of one of its organising principles, namely the principle of zoomability. As Lotman (2001) has pointed out, culture can be understood as a vast semiosphere in which various levels of sub- and superordinated, interacting semiospheres are embedded. The same idea of hierarchical embeddedness is expressed by systems thinking: Another key criterion of systems thinking is the ability to shift one’s attention back and forth between systems levels. Throughout the living world we find systems nesting within other systems, and by applying the same concepts to different systems levels – for example, the concept of stress to an organism, a city, or an economy – we can often gain important insights. (Capra 1996, 37)

In accordance with systems thinking, I conceive of narrativity as existing on different levels, from the individual narrative experience of a specific reader to the level of cultural narrative negotiations. The Pyramid is not designed to be applicable to only one of these levels, but to all of them, even though, of course, “different systems levels represent levels of differing complexity” (Capra 1996, 37). Accordingly, one can zoom in or out of cultural levels and even in or out of particular elements of the Pyramid.297 That there are different ways of conceptualising the circulatory design of the Pyramid is thus a consequence of the Pyramid’s “systemic” design. 297 For example, by zooming into the textual system (at the virtual level of narrativity), one can discover various levels (from morphemes via the syntactic level to the levels of story and discourse), codes (see Barthes 2000), dynamics of progression (see Phelan 2007), of causality (see Kafalenos 2006) and so forth. If one zooms into the cognitive-affective system of the reader, one enters the complex field of the reader’s “experientiality” (see Caracciolo 2014), of various cognitive frames and parameters (see Fludernik 1996), emotions (see, e.g., Tan 1996) and systems of knowledge (see Heinemann and Viehweger 1991; Scherner 1994, 327–338).

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A second aspect of narrativity, which does not comply well with the stratification of the Pyramid – besides its circular dynamics –, refers to its “phenomenal summit”, that is, to the level of narrative meaning (see section 2.4.8). Not only the stage of resultative narrativity has phenomenal (meaning) equivalents (and thus “a phenomenal summit”), but possibly also the other stages insofar as meaning is not a quality that emerges only at the end of a text and its reception, but that emerges continuously during the reading process. Every sentence or other narrative micro-level phenomenon can gain, for a specific reader, a particular meaning, due to her/his “experiential background” (see Caracciolo 2014). Positioning the dimension of meaning at the highest and last stratum of the pyramid might provoke a misunderstanding according to which meaning would be exclusively the positive result of a finished process of consistency-building. I disagree with this reading of the Pyramid and wish to highlight instead the Pyramid’s “rhizomatic” (and “smooth”) quality: its “lines of flight” cut transversally across narrative strata of narrativity, interconnecting them. If I offer a pyramidal model, even though it does not lend itself well to the representation of such circulatory and transversal connections, it is, on the one hand, because according to most theories the reading process as a whole is directed towards the creation of a coherent gestalt and an experience of meaning (see section 2.4.8). This goal-directedness of narrative processing is visualised by the ascending levels of the Pyramid, along a vertical axis, which tapers off (i.e. “culminates”) in narrative meaning. On the other hand, I maintain the pyramidal model because reading most often means – deconstructivist or experimental forms of nonlinear reading set aside – to follow the linear trajectory of the text,298 which brings about the progressive (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) development and enrichment of a mental model (which by no means must lead to a successful result). Such narrative progression is illustrated by the temporal vertical axis of the Pyramid as well. This temporal dimension of narrativity could also be expressed in terms of the distinction of micro- versus macro-structures. According to this conceptual pair, the Pyramid can represent the macro-level process of reading and narrative meaning making insofar as it takes the whole text and the entirety of readerly responses into account. But the Pyramid also lends itself also to the discussion and illustration of (cyclic and recursive) micro-level phenomena of narrative

298 This is (of course) only possible if such a linear parcours exists. Richardson (2006; 2015) has exposed with great diligence the many forms of nonlinear discourse that can be found in modern and postmodern literature.

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text processing (e.g. punctual gaps and gap-filling activities, narrative anchors, partial “narrative spaces”299 and the like).

2.4.5 Virtual narrativity and the principle of zoomability The lowest level of the Pyramid refers to the conditions under which the reading and processing of a (specific part of a) text takes place. These conditions consist of a textual (semiotic) system, including all of its structures and properties, and of the cognitive-affective system of the reader.300 It is called the virtual level of narrativity because it refers to a situation or state where narrativity exists only as a possibility, that is, virtually. I am using, on the one hand, the idea of virtuality in a philosophical sense, as it has been presented by Ryan: The philosophical concept of the virtual entertains close relations with the possible. In scholastic Latin, virtualis designates ‘what is in the power (virtus) of the force.’ The classical example of virtuality is the presence of the oak in the acorn. This conception of the virtual, which opposes it to the actual, maybe called the virtual as potential. (Ryan 2005c, 627)

On the other hand, my notion of virtuality carries some of the meanings that have been given to it in literary and narrative theory, especially in Iser’s (1976) effect aesthetics (see section 3.1.3). According to Iser, the meaning(s) of a work exist only virtually before the text is being processed, in the form of potential meaning. His theory is inconsistent with the view that readers “receive” (detect, discover) a meaningfulness that would exist before the act of reading. Instead, Iser argues that the meanings of a text only come into being through the reading process: readers actualise the virtuality of the text by constituting it – not arbitrarily, but in accordance with the text’s implicit reading instructions. For Iser, it is thus the interaction between the literary text and the reader that produces meaning.301 Correspondingly, he conceives of the “literary work” as being constituted by the reader and the text as its “two poles”. He thus highlights the interconnectedness and interdependence of text and reader in the process of meaning-making. Although I subscribe to this view, I prefer to conceptualise reader and text as two subsystems, which jointly constitute an

299 Dancygier (2012b) theorises narrative anchors and spaces (see section 2.3.5.). 300 Indeed, also the “(un)ground” of narrativity can be considered to be partly virtual insofar as the transition from the anthropological “(un)ground of narrativity” to the actualised narratives on the level of “virtual narrativity” implies the creation of narrative. 301 This view has been confirmed by empirical research (see Viehoff 1988, 7).

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overarching narrative system, which is set into motion as soon as the two subsystems are interconnected. Introducing the notion of “system” into my narrative theory serves, on the one hand, the aim to highlight the complexity302 that characterises the text, the reader and a fortiori their interaction. Considering the text as a system highlights two facts: first, that the (narrative) text is constituted by a variety of (e.g., morphological, lexical, syntactical, sequential, intersequential and even intertextual) levels, units and properties, which jointly constitute a complex structure; and secondly, that everything in a narrative text (like in a rhizome) is somehow connected (or rather: connectable) to anything else. As Barthes puts it, “c’est un système pur, il n’y a pas, il n’y a jamais d’unité perdue, si long, si lâche, si ténu que soit le fil qui la relie à l’un des niveaux de l’histoire” (1966, 7).303 The potential of meaning inherent in this textual system can be realised as soon as it becomes explored by a receiver and connected with specific contexts: “[l]a narration ne peut en effet recevoir son sens que du monde qui en use: au-delà du niveau narrationnel, commence le monde, c’est-à-dire d’autres systèmes (sociaux, économiques, idéologiques) [. . .]” (1966, 22, emphasis mine).304 Concerning the reader, the innumerable range of cognitivist, cognitive-linguistic, psycholinguistic, pragmatic, literary-theoretical and reader-response theories, which aim at theorising the reader’s cognitive-affective system (and its interaction with texts) illustrate the great complexity of the latter.305 One step in the analysis of this complexity consists, for instance, of identifying its many subsystems. Viehweger (1989, 259–260), for example, discriminates between five different “knowledge 302 Although “complexity” has been studied from various angles and in a broad range of disciplines, both in natural and social sciences (see Érdi 2008, 1), an exhaustive definition of complexity does not seem to exist. What the different approaches nonetheless have in common is their interest and research into the workings of complex (open, living) systems. Recursion, dissipative structures, self-organisation and emergence are some of its key concepts (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; also, Capra 1996; De Wolf and Holvoet 2005; Érdi 2008). Moreover, circular dynamics (such as circular causality, logical paradoxes, or strange loops) play a crucial role in complexity theory (see Hofstadter 1979). See Pier’s (2017) contribution and my own considerations on the relationship between complexity theory and narratology in Emerging Vectors of Narratology (Hansen et al. 2017). 303 “It is a pure system: there are no wasted units, and there can never be any, however long, loose, or tenuous the threads which link them to one of the levels of the story” (Barthes 1975, 245). 304 “Narration can indeed receive its meaning only from the world which makes use of it: beyond the narration level begins the external world, that is to say other systems (social, economic, ideological) [. . .]” (Barthes 1975, 264–265, emphasis mine). 305 See, e.g., Bruner (1991); Gerrig (1993); Fludernik (1996; 2003); Jahn (1997; 2003); Turner (1998; 2003; 2006; Schneider (2000); Herman (2002; 2003a, b; 2013b); Flanagan (2008); Nemesio, Levorato and Ronconi (2008); Schaeffer (2010); Dancygier (2012b).

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systems”, which apply during the production and processing of texts: (i) language knowledge, (ii) knowledge of the real world or encyclopedic knowledge, (iii) illocutionary knowledge, (iv) pattern- or schema-knowledge and (v) knowledge of conversational principles.306 Introducing the notion of “system” into my narrative theory serves, on the other hand, to signal my adherence to what Capra (1996) calls “systems thinking” according to which “[n]ature is seen as an interconnected web of relationships, in which the identification of specific patterns as ‘objects’ depends on the human observer and the process of knowing” (Capra 1996, 40). According to Capra, systems thinking highlights life’s “tendency to form multileveled structures of systems within systems. Each of these forms a whole with respect to its parts while at the same time being a part of a larger whole” (28). Correspondingly, “we find systems nesting within other systems” (37).307 This systemic ontology underlies the Pyramid, in which everything is, also in compliance with Deleuze’s rhizome, connected or connectable to everything else. For example, the narrativity of a text depends (inter alia) on the receiver’s process of reading it, which, for its part, depends (inter alia) on personal experiences and cultural contexts, the latter being shaped, in turn, by other narratives. This systemic view is also responsible for the Pyramid’s principle of zoomability. The Pyramid should be understood as allowing, in principle, for a “zoom” into each of its “regions” (levels and elements). The zoom factor that I have chosen for the representation of the Pyramid in Figure 6 provides an overview of different ontological states of narrativity.308 Subsequent chapters, however, will zoom onto particular regions of the pyramidal map whenever theories or concepts of narrativity are discussed that have, so to speak, a higher degree of magnification than my pyramidal map. All in all, the Pyramid depicts narrativity as a quality that emerges from the complex interaction of its various embedded or otherwise interconnected systems and regions.

306 Different kinds of emotion are another great area of the reader’s cognitive-affective system on which I cannot elaborate here. 307 What is important in this context is the fact that “different systems levels represent levels of differing complexity. At each level the observed phenomena exhibit properties that do not exist at lower levels. The systemic properties of a particular level are called ‘emergent’ properties, since they emerge at that particular level” (Capra 1996, 37). 308 Printed maps have to decide how much geographical space they wish to represent (say, Europe versus a particular district of a particular city), thereby deciding for or against the representation of geographical details. Three-dimensional digital maps, by contrast, enable users to zoom in or out of the map. The Pyramid, for its part, is designed in the spirit of such an interactive digital software; its gestalt, actualised in Figure 6, should be thought of as embedding “deeper” levels on which further narrative elements and dimensions can be found.

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2.4.6 Narrativity in actualisation Virtual narrativity transforms itself into narrativity in actualisation as soon as the interaction between the textual system and the cognitive-affective system of the reader begins, and with it the readers’ search for narrative coherence and meaning. Many narratologists share the view that narrativity depends on the interaction between the recipient and the semiotic object. Wolf, for instance, explains that “the identification and application of the frame narrative is the outcome of an interaction between decoding recipients and features of an artefact encoded by an author” (2003, 184). While Wolf underlines the (positive) outcome of this interaction, I wish to highlight that narrativity in actualisation works (only) toward the creation of a coherent narrative schema or gestalt, without implying necessarily a successful result. Already Lotman points to “that large intermediate zone that lies between the comprehension and noncomprehension of an artistic text” (1977, 24). The stage of narrativity in actualisation covers a variety of inferential and elaborative activities on the part of the reader, which have been theorised in a broad range of approaches, in linguistics, literary theory, semiotics and narratology. An umbrella term for most of these activities is (the process of creating) coherence (see chapter 3). What I would like to emphasise is the fact that coherence in progress forms a counterpart to narrative closure. Aristotle’s dictum, according to which a whole has a beginning, a middle and an end,309 is one of the first theoretical requirements of narrative closure. Since then, a broad array of theorists has insisted on closure as an important feature of narrative.310 Narrativity in actualisation, by contrast, provides the processes that aim at the establishment of narrative closure with an autonomous status, thus highlighting the dynamics as such. One of the most well-known dynamics that are situated on the level of actualisation is gap-filling (or gapping) according to which “audiences mobilise a variety of cognitive abilities in combination with a large amount of linguistic,

309 “We have already defined tragedy as the representation of an action which is complete and whole [. . .]. Now to be whole is to have a beginning, a middle and an end” (Aristotle 2001, 20). 310 To name just a few: Labov (1972, 363) offers a six-fold model of a “fully-formed” oral narrative. Ricœur (1985, 8) proposes a concept of “plot” that is based on “temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous” and Prince contends that “[n]arrativity depends also on the extent to which the events presented constitute (or pertain to) a whole, a complete structure with a beginning, a middle and an end” (1982, 151). Bruner invokes the idea of wholeness and closure as well under the heading of “hermeneutic composability”, explaining that “parts and wholes in a narrative rely on each other for their viability” (1991, 8).

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social, and cultural information, allowing them to complete perceived patterns, making sense of them in context” (Spolsky 2005, 193). In literary theory, Roman Ingarden has introduced the related idea of “points of indeterminacy” and Iser the idea of “blanks”, which are filled by readers during the process of reception (see Spolsky 2005, 193). According to a more cognitivist point of view, gap-filling refers to the bridging of textual gaps of information by means of cognitive schemata.311 Gapping plays inter alia a role in Ryan’s “principle of minimal departure” – “a law of primary importance for the phenomenology of reading” (1991, 51) – according to which “any departure from norms not explicitly stated in the text is to be regarded as a gratuitous increase of the distance between the textual universe and our own system of reality” (1991, 51); “we will project upon these [fictional, ESW] worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (51). This is an example of “top-down” processes taking place during narrativity in actualisation (see section 3.1). In other narratological approaches, the idea of gap-filling has been slightly modified, referring not to the completion of general cognitive schemata invoked by the text, but to the filling of gaps in the individual narrative schema of a specific narrative. As Kafalenos notes with regard to deferred or suppressed information in narrative, “[m]issing information matters because we interpret and reinterpret events, from moment to moment, on the basis of information that is available to us at that moment” (1999, 35). Correspondingly, for Sternberg (1992; 2010), the three narrative “master interests” suspense, curiosity and surprise are “gap-dependent interests” (1992, 524) in the story: Although different in thrust, all involve the construction of rival hypotheses with which to fill in the gaps opened up by the sequence about the world’s affairs and whatever attaches to them by nature or art, which in narrative means everything. (Sternberg 1992, 531–532)

For Herman, gapping is often the result of an “underspecification of action” (2002, 66–67). He also contends that different kinds of gap-filling activities can be correlated with different narrative genres.312

311 As Emmott and Alexander explain, “[t]he term ‘schema’ is often used as a superordinate label for a broad range of knowledge structures, including frames, scenarios, scripts and plans. ‘Schema’ is also used as synonym for ‘frame’ (Minsky 1975) to refer to mental representations of objects, settings or situations” (2014, 756). 312 “Debatably, differences among narrative genres can be correlated with differences in the number and kind of slots for action description left open in a story. To put the same point another way, different sorts of stories differently trigger inferences used to complete action

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Theories of gap-filling represent, however, only a small portion of the broad range of approaches that theorise the interplay of the text and the reader. Many approaches of cognitive narratology, whether they theorise (for example) character,313 point of view,314 plot-related macro-structures315 or other phenomena, can be understood as theories of narrativity in actualisation, but only to the extent to which they illuminate the processes and dynamics that take place at the nexus of text and reader (as well as context).316

2.4.7 Resultative narrativity Resultative narrativity denotes a narrative schema, gestalt, structure, that is, a specific narrative wholeness, which is the aim and/or the positive result of narrative (text) processing. As far as I see, most narrative theories, even if they account for narrative dynamics, somehow imply resultative narrativity, since many narratologists suggest that narrativity can only be ascribed if some kind of order can be established. Sturgess defends an extreme position of this kind inasmuch as he assumes that every narrative is already coherent by itself (“principle of autocoherence”, see 1992, 35, 56, 68–92). Correspondingly, he holds that “to read any narrative with a sense of its wholeness means to read its narrativity” (1992, 28).317 Schaeffer equally defends the idea of a narrative “auto-closure” (“autoclôture actantielle [. . .] ou herméneutique”, 2010, 217), but considers that kind of resultative narrativity as a feature not of all narratives, but of good, successful ones:

representation that are naturally and normally underspecified, to varying degrees, in narrative discourse” (Herman 2002, 64, orig. emphasis). 313 See, e.g., Schneider (2000). 314 See, e.g., Hartner (2012); Herman (2009b); Nünning (2001). 315 See, e.g., Herman (2002; 2009a); Ryan (1991; 1992), Dancygier (2012b). 316 If cognitive narratology covers, as Herman states, all those approaches that examine “the mental states, capacities, and dispositions that provide ground for – or, conversely, are grounded in – narrative experiences” (Herman 2014, 46), then the scope of cognitive narratology is not restricted to the stage of narrativity in actualisation, since mental capacities or dispositions pertain, in my model, to the virtual stage of narrativity. 317 Sturgess bases his holistic and resultative conception of narrativity on the assumption of a “higher level causality” or a “logic of narrativity”: “When speaking of a logic of narrativity we are concerning ourselves with the syntagmatic or linear course which every narrative is bound to follow, and with the higher-level causal logic which determines that course at every point [. . .]” (1992, 31, orig. emphasis). This amounts to identifying narrativity with authorial intent: “What I am primarily interested in here is authorial power and intentionality as they fuse directly with the unfolding narrativity of any work” (62).

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[. . .] pour qu’un récit soit réussi il faut que son récepteur le considère comme complet et clos sur lui-même, cet effet de complétude et d’auto-clôture pouvant correspondre à des structures narratives fort diverses et pouvant être réalisé à des niveaux fort différents (formels, actantiels, herméneutiques, métanarratifs, etc.). (Schaeffer 2010, 217)318

One is tempted to ask the author whether he finds Kafka’s novels not réussis: they have never been finished, they even seem to be designed to avoid the interpretative process coming to an end (see chapter 5) and they display a kind of interpretative openness, which allows them to be connected with the most diverse subjects. But the author anticipates this objection: [. . .] l’effet de complétude et l’auto-clôture est tout à fait compatible avec une structure actantielle trouée ou incomplète (par exemple Beckett) ou à déficit herméneutique (par exemple Kafka). Il suffit pour cela que cette structure trouée ou incomplète et ce déficit puissent être construits par le lecteur comme des moyens pour réaliser une auto-clôture ou complétude de niveau supérieur, c’est-à-dire qu’ils lui apparaissent comme significatives en tant que structure métanarrative. (Schaeffer 2010, 217)319

It cannot be denied that Schaeffer makes a good point here insofar as literary interpretations that perform such an “interpretative ascent”320 are abundant; they represent indeed a widely used interpretative strategy. What is nonetheless problematic, in my view, is Schaeffer’s claim according to which such meta-narrative closure is the decisive criterion of narrativity or of successful text-reader interaction, since this claim snuffs out the ambiguity that each interpretative ascent brings about. On the one hand, even if one creates narrative closure on a meta-level, one still feels the distance or gap between the well-formed interpretative meta-narrative gestalt and the gappy, disordered, deficient reality of the text as it presents itself; on the other hand, even the most consistent meta-gestalt cannot preserve its ideal of closure, because interpretative conflicts and debates (e.g. on the question of whether an interpretative ascent at the respective text passage is legitimate at all) can arise and thus

318 “For a narrative to be well-made, the receiver has to perceive it as complete and closed upon itself; this effect of completeness and of auto-closure can correspond to the most diverse narrative structures and be realised on very different (formal, actantial, hermeneutic, metanarrative, etc.) levels” (translation mine). 319 “[. . .] the effect of completeness and auto-closure is absolutely compatible with a gappy or incomplete actantial structure (Beckett, for example) or with a hermeneutic deficit (Kafka, for example). All that is needed in this regard is that this gappy or incomplete structure and this deficit can be constructed by the reader as a means by which a higher-order auto-closure or completeness manifests itself; that is, that they appear meaningful to him or her as a metanarrative structure” (Schaeffer 2010, 217, translation mine). 320 See my discussion of this phenomenon in the context of Toussaint’s narrativity (chapter 6).

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reopen Pandora’s Box.321 In a nutshell, textual gaps or incoherencies cue readers to create closure, eventually on a meta-level (if necessary), but this higherorder closure cannot emancipate itself completely from its “gappy” origins; there is a dialectics between the ascription of coherence and meaning and its textual absence (or “withdrawal”, see chapter 5), which cannot simply be eliminated in favour of one side. In other words, Schaeffer’s criterion of auto-closure overemphasises one of the stages of narrativity (resultative narrativity) to the detriment of another one (namely narrativity in actualisation). In linguistics, resultative narrativity is equally understood as the positive result of narrative processing, this result being a coherent mental representation, called “situation model” (see section 3.1). It refers to the whole range of “representations of the characters, events, states, goals, and actions that are described by the story” (Zwaan et al. 1995, 292). In narratological theories, there are, as far as I see, two major matters of dispute connected with resultative narrativity. The first debate concerns the question of which shape the narrative gestalt has. Some theorists identify resultative narrativity with a temporal (syntagmatic) configuration; others highlight the “spatial” (paradigmatic) form of the narrative structures; others again consider the narrative gestalt as a combination of both temporal and spatial, syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions (see section 2.3.7). A second debate regards the question of what (still) counts as a narrative gestalt, or, in other words, how much and which kind of consistency is needed for the ascription of narrativity. Especially in postmodern and experimental texts, discourse can impair the construction of a story. Narrative discourse can prevail over the story (e.g., due to excessive digressions, reflections or descriptions of the narrator); the represented events can provide insufficient cues for the establishment of an unambiguous (e.g., temporal, chrono-logical or causal) gestalt; and fragmented and deconstructed forms of discourse can endanger the text’s overall intelligibility. Correspondingly, texts can be located on a scale of representation, which ranges from a mimetic to an anti-mimetic pole, and theorists disagree as to whether narrativity should be ascribed to antimimetic texts, especially if they refuse to tell a story (see sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.6).322

321 What is inside of the Box, threatening to appear again in full? The text’s deficiencies, “blanks” and inconsistencies that closure has tried so hard to lock away. 322 Ricœur, for example, makes a plea for mimesis, arguing that “narrative” basically means “to arrange systematically what happens” (1985, 22). Richardson (2015) is the main representative of the counter-position. He argues for the existence and acceptation within narratology of

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This second debate is linked to two other concerns. Firstly, inasmuch as extremely antimimetic texts are often ranged under the label of avant-garde (or high) literature, the debate poses the important question of how narrativity and literariness are related to each other. Secondly, it is not clear to what extent the narrative gestalt depends on the text (and on what Iser calls the text’s “instructions”)323 or on the reader. How far can readers go, as they interpretatively supplement the text’s gaps or “deficiencies”, without transgressing the text’s scope? Richardson states that, “[t]o a large extent, we select out (or read in) the coherence that we end up with, as discovery merges with creation” (2015, 45), but it is not clear at which point creativity (i.e., reading-in) outranks coherence (understood as an orderly structure that respects the potential and the limits of the text).324

2.4.8 The phenomenal summit of narrativity: Meaning Meaning is a notoriously ambiguous term. In their short overview on literary meaning (“Bedeutung”), Jannidis, Lauer, Martínez and Winko (2003) have explored (i) how meaning has been understood in various theoretical movements and approaches and (ii) what its components are from a systematic point of view.325 With regard to the latter question, the authors observe that concepts of meaning differ as to which factors of meaning they include and highlight. According to the authors, the main factors that participate in meaning-making are the author, the text, the reader and (historical, semantic and media-related) contexts. Furthermore, literary meaning can be understood pluralistically since, according to a literary-theoretical topos, literary texts allow by definition for a certain ambiguity, i.e., for different interpretative meanings. Literary meaning can also be divided into (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) submeanings, associated with a “subversive” poetics of deviation and correlated with other terms such as theme/content, symptom, sense, reference, meaning in a larger sense “antimimetic narratives”. Herman, for his part, disputes “the existence of any sharp divide or dichotomy between ‘mimetic’ and ‘antimimetic’ narratives” (in Herman et al. 2012, 222). 323 See section 3.1.4. 324 This is where the notion of narrativity touches upon the opposed literary-theoretical paradigms of “openness” (Eco) versus (hermeneutic) closure. 325 Concerning the first question, the authors draw on the divergent concepts of meaning that have been presented in analytical philosophy (Frege, Wittgenstein), analytical aesthetics (Kant), linguistics (Grice), literary theory (Hirsch, Eco, Goodman, Gabriel), hermeneutics (Gadamer, Jauß), stylistics of deviation (Voßler, Spitzer, Fricke), structuralism (Shklovsky, Jakobson, Propp), deconstructivism (Derrida, de Man) and marxism (Lukács).

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(“Sinn”, understood as the overall significance of a work), importance (for a particular reader) and interpretation (or “reading”: Lektüre). The authors come to the conclusion that the notion of meaning does not denote one and the same phenomenon, which would only be explained differently by different theories, but that the notion itself refers to quite different phenomena. Furthermore, these phenomena cannot be directly compared to each other since they are at the core of incompatible macro-theories (about verbal communication, art, society and the like, see Jannidis et al. 2003, 28). Using a term that is to such an extent ambiguous always represents a risk. If I use the term nonetheless, it is because the constitution of meaning represents the goal of narrative text processing, whether it is ultimately achieved or not; it thus has to be integrated into the pyramidal map of narrativity. Meaning is thereby presented as an important dimension of narrativity. Many narratological theories insinuate that narrativity correlates somehow with the creation of meaning, but they fail to explicate the exact relationship between the two notions. In the following, I will explore four kinds of narratological approaches, which theorise in different ways the connection between narrativity and meaning.326 According to a first conception, narrative meaning results from the resultative coherence of the story (and/or the discourse) that is represented by a narrative. Prince relates narrativity and narrative meaning by stating, on the one hand, that a story must have “a point” (1982, 158–159), and, on the other, that a narrative must represent a “meaningful” temporal configuration: The narrativity of a text depends on the extent to which that text fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholes, involving some sort of conflict, made up of discrete, specific and positive events, and meaningful in terms of a human project and a humanized universe. (Prince 1982, 160, emphasis mine)

Ryan’s definition goes in a similar direction: the last (and the most pragmatic) out of nine “nested conditions” of narrativity requires that “[t]he story must have a point” (2006, 194) or “must communicate something meaningful to the audience” (2007, 29). Interestingly, both Prince and Ryan place the criterion of meaning at the end of their definitions, thereby insinuating that narrative

326 I leave aside meaning conceptions that relate to the production or enunciation of narratives, since they play only a minor role in the Pyramid, but it should be noted that such approaches do exist as well. Bres’s approach, for example, relates the meaning of récit to its ontic linguistic status and to its transformation or inversion of passive “descendant” time into the opposite direction of an actively mastered, “ascendant” time: “Le récit donne sens (signification) parce qu’il donne sens (direction ascendante)”; “Le sujet n’apparaît plus défait de ce qu’il a subi mais fait de ce qu’il (a) construit” (Bres 1994, 176).

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meaning is the ultimate effect or result of the reader’s building of a coherent mental representation of a (temporally evolving and eventful) storyworld. In these approaches, the creation of a narrative gestalt thus appears as the condition of narrative meaning.327 This conception of narrative complies with a form of narrativity that allows readers to ascend the different stages of the Pyramid regularly, from virtual narrativity up to the summit of meaning. According to a second approach, narrativity can be understood as a specific cognitive “tool” (see Herman 2003b), “strategy” (Herman 2003a, 2) or “device” (Hühn 2004, 139), which allows people to “make sense” both of the world328 and of the stories told by others: On the one hand, analysts of narrative have studied mental representations and cognitive processes instrumental to people’s ability to make sense of stories. [. . .]. On the other hand, analysts have studied narrative as itself an instrument for sense-making, a semiotic and communicative resource that enables humans to make their way in a sometimes confusing, often difficult world. (Herman 2003a, 12)

In such approaches, narrative meaning is not primarily linked to the result of narrative processing, but to the function (and process) of narrating and of narrative processing. This view is consistent with the Pyramid inasmuch as narrativity in actualisation is directed towards (and thus serves) the summit of meaning; it also emphasises the embeddedness of the Pyramid within contexts (such as the world or other narratives) and the exchanges that take place between the two (see Figure 6b). According to a third concept, meaning is considered rather as a condition of narrativity insofar as it represents an expectation of the reader (“attente de sens”, see Baroni 2007, 19). If meaning is expected to emerge from reading, it represents the driving force behind the processual creation of coherence 327 In my understanding, however, the phenomenal “summit” of meaning can be read both as following from and as corresponding to “lower” strata or stage(s) of narrativity (see section 2.4.4). 328 Bruner, for his part, does not speak of “meaning”, but contends that narrative “operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of reality” (1991, 5–6). He argues that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors” (4). Hühn relates narrativity to sense-making: “Narrating appears to be an anthropologically universal device utilized by humans in all cultures and epochs within a wide spectrum of pragmatic and artistic contexts for structuring experience, making sense of the world and of one’s self as well as communicating such interpreted structures through a sign system to others or to oneself” (Hühn 2004, 139, emphasis mine). Herman even goes one step further. With a side-glance to questions of distributed intelligence, he examines the “intelligence-enhancing functions of narrative” (2013b, 227).

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(e.g., behind gap-filling activities and its functional correlates: suspense, curiosity and surprise).329 This understanding of meaning can be understood in terms of the stage of virtual narrativity insofar as it is part of the cognitiveaffective system of the reader. If the expectation of the reader derives from the situation of literary communication, readers can equate the meaning they are in search of with the “purpose” of the text, or with the “will” behind the textual surface, thus identifying it with a pre-textual authorial meaning330: Unless one denies narrative all sense of purpose [. . .] the forms of sequence must derive from functions: the given surface from the underlying goals and directives, mimetics from poetics, how’s from why’s, whatever they may be. Where there’s a way taken in discourse, there’s always presumably a will behind it – the writer’s, the genre’s, the culture’s, variously interacting – so that in coming together the one fulfills and reflects the other (or, from the interpreter’s side, the one finds its unity and intelligibility in the other). (Sternberg 1992, 482)

As a fourth concept, I would like to draw on Wolf, who is one of the few theorists who offers an explicit explanation of the relationship between narrativity and meaning.331 He defines narrativity via three “basic functions” (2003, 184), which simultaneously represent narrativity’s “core elements” or “main narratemes” (185): experientiality, communicative representationality and “a tendency towards meaningfulness” (186, orig. emphasis). While Prince and Ryan do not shy away from making meaning a defining criterion of narrativity, Wolf mitigates this criterion by speaking of “possibilities of making sense” (188), of “a potential of” (189) or “a tendency towards” (186) meaningfulness. He indicates two reasons for this mitigation of the criterion of meaning: first, in order to accommodate narrative texts or artefacts which ultimately reject meaning, and second, because the very affirmation or even exploration of meaning presupposes a latent uncertainty, an acknowledgment of counter-forces, a fear that the vicissitudes of

329 Ricœur, for example, considers the search for concordance as the condition of narrative, holding “that the search for concordance is part of the unavoidable assumptions of discourse and communication. [. . .] Intelligibility always precedes itself and justifies itself” (1985, 28, emphasis mine). This argument amounts to considering the search for meaning as the condition of narrative, since, for Ricœur, “concordance” is equivalent with “sense”, as the following oppositions, established in Ricœur’s summary of Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, reveal: “Kermode’s book ceaselessly oscillates between the [. . .] suspicion that fictions lie [. . .] and the [. . .] conviction that fictions are not simply arbitrary, inasmuch as they respond to a need over which we are not masters, the need to impress the stamp of order upon the chaos of existence, of sense upon nonsense, of concordance upon discordance” (27, emphasis mine). 330 See section 2.5.1. My model does not position itself in the literary-theoretical debate on intentionality, seeking to remain neutral with regard to theories of interpretation. 331 For a summary of Wolf’s approach, see section 2.3.3.

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existence may be pointless, contingent and inexplicable. In spite of, or perhaps because of its being motivated by a latent fear of chaos, narrative is one of the most powerful tools we have to give meaning to our existence as beings conscious of time. (Wolf 2003, 185)

In this quotation, Wolf links meaning to the human creation of order, to the mastery of chaos, to coherence as opposed to contingency.332 For him, narrativity implies a certain awareness of the problem of creating such a meaning, which is based on coherence. If sense-making can itself be the subject of narratives (which can be treated on the level of both content and form), and if narratives are thus free to position themselves either on the extreme end of order or of chaos, then it must be inadequate to simply blank out the pole of chaos and reduce narrativity arbitrarily to a meaningfulness that would arise with order alone.333 Indeed, Ricœur has experienced this problem as so unsettling that he has devoted a great part of the second volume of Time and Narrative to it. If one compares the approaches of Wolf and Ricœur, one sees that their positions differ significantly from each other. Wolf seeks to find a balance between order and chaos, while Ricœur considers them to be rather incompatible alternatives and ultimately makes a decision in favour of order and meaning.334 Wolf’s position, however, is ambiguous – not only with regard to the textual and/or cognitive quality of his narratemes (see section 2.3.3), but also with regard to the question of whether narrativity is linked to (meaningful) order or (meaningless) chaos. On the one hand, he explicitly includes chaos into his theory (see above), but, on the other, he explicitly excludes it: Even if details of the narrative world and its constituents are given, this would still not be sufficient for a typical narrative, for these constituents must be brought into some intelligible connection with each other. It is only by creating or suggesting intelligible coherence among its components that narratives can fulfil their third fundamental quality besides experientiality and representationality: this third quality derives from the basic philosophic function of the frame narrative; it is a tendency towards meaningfulness that is based on the existence of sense-making or cohesive devices [. . .]. (Wolf 2003, 186, emphasis mine, orig. emphasis deleted)

What is at the core of the formula “tendency towards meaningfulness” is thus obviously a contradictory hypothesis according to which narrativity should

332 The role of contingency in narratives has been analysed by Warning (2001). 333 See my criticism of Schaeffer (section 2.4.7). 334 “Frustration cannot be the last word. The reader’s work of composition cannot be made completely impossible” (Ricœur 1985, 25).

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denote both (i) a meaningfulness, which develops with order and (ii) a lack or rejection of meaningfulness linked to chaos. The theoretical dilemma with which Wolf is confronted is the incompatibility between the human need for order and meaning and the insight that narrative configurations and meanings hide and distort a more fundamental disorder (and corresponding meaningless), which is characteristic of the “flux of unknowable and indivisible being” (Fludernik 1996, 41). I would subscribe to Wolf’s approach fully if he had theorised this insight in terms of a dialectics of chaos and order, as Koschorke (2012) does. Instead, Wolf obviously does not want to surrender meaningfulness as the decisive criterion. This becomes obvious, for instance, in his own summary of his approach. In this summary, he italicises the central narratemes experientiality, representationality and meaningfulness in order to highlight their importance, but he does not italicise the supplementary “potential of” (meaningfulness); the italics insinuate that only meaningfulness (and not its “potential”) is, in his eyes, a full, defining narrateme (which, in turn, cannot be separated from the creation of narrative order). Wolf’s approach thus merges dimensions of narrativity that the pyramidal model distinguishes in four regards. Firstly, a narrative order or gestalt (resultative narrativity) is not necessarily equivalent to meaning (phenomenal summit), since a phenomenal experience of meaning can also emerge from previous narrative dynamics. Secondly, neither resultative narrativity nor meaning(fulness) have to be reached for narrativity to exist, since narrativity also resides in the stages of virtual narrativity and of narrativity in actualisation. Considered from this angle, the Pyramid allows the dialectics of order and chaos to be accounted for without making contradictory claims. On the one hand, chaos can be theorised as a textual quality and therefore as a phenomenon that is located at the level of virtual narrativity; more precisely, in the textual system. Textual disorder and contingency can (sometimes) be overcome through interpretative processes. On the other hand, chaos can be theorised as a quality of interpretation, located at the stage of narrativity in actualisation. In this case, textual disorder cannot easily be overcome through interpretation; it denotes a text-reader interplay that hinders readers from moving forward, that is, from ascending from narrativity in actualisation to resultative narrativity (or, respectively, to the summit of meaning).335 Thirdly, Wolf’s (textual) “potential of meaning” can be understood as a (readerly) expectation of meaning, which, in my model, corresponds to the

335 See my further reflections on Wolf’s (2003) approach in section 2.5.2.

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stage of virtual narrativity, more precisely, to the cognitive-affective system of the reader. Fourthly, Wolf’s idea of a “tendency towards meaningfulness” can – insofar as it indicates a direction –, be correlated with the pyramid’s vertical axis of processing, which denotes not only a temporal development, but also a directedness of the processing activities of readers towards the creation of meaning, i.e., towards the summit of narrativity. To conclude, I would like to draw attention to a communality of the narratological approaches delineated above: they conceptualise meaning in terms of order (coherence, concordance, configuration and the like). Meaning is alternately understood as an order that . . . a) . . . one expects (virtual narrativity in the cognitive-affective system of the reader); b) . . . is already given by the work’s poietic logic (see, e.g., Sturgess 1992) (virtual narrativity in the textual subsystem); c) . . . one searches for (vertical axis of the pyramid and narrativity in actualisation), i.e. which can or has to be established, thus “impress[ing] the stamp [. . .] of concordance upon discordance” (Ricœur 1985, 27); d) . . . readers seek to develop, possibly with quite different results,336 by diverse inferential and interpretative activities (narrativity in actualisation); e) . . . one has successfully established (resultative narrativity). The narrative meaning that results from narrative processing is, in my understanding, a complex conglomerate of diverse cognitive and emotive or – to speak in Caracciolo’s (2014) terms – experiential structures and contents,337 which are partly objectively explicable, partly conditioned by individual subjective interests, emotions, values and ways of thinking (see, e.g., Viehoff 1988). The narrative schema or gestalt, insofar as it can be deduced from the narrative text by objective, more or less rule-governed mental operations, represents (metaphorically speaking) only a narrative “skeleton” to which only the irreducible subjectivity of the reader or, as Caracciolo (2014) puts it, his or her “experiential background” adds flesh and blood.

336 The term “different results”, in this context, has two meanings: on the one hand, successful versus unsuccessful attempts of establishing coherence and, on the other, different interpretative results of narrative processing. 337 According to Caracciolo (2014), the experiential background “is in part shared among all of our conspecifics, in part shared among those who grew up in comparable cultural, environmental, and historical circumstances, in part unique to every individual’s history of structural coupling with the world” (2014, 62). See my considerations on the S/U problem (section 2.2).

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All in all, readers’ emotional responses to fiction arise from the complex interplay between the representational instructions of the narrative (and in particular the characters and the situations in which they are involved), its expressive form, and readers’ own background. (Caracciolo 2014, 66)

In Caracciolo’s understanding, the so-called experiential background is “not an undifferentiated whole, but a field that is variously and continuously shaped by the biological make-up, culture, positioning, and personal experience of every individual” (2014, 57). Caracciolo visualises this “field” of the experiential background as five concentric circles, which represent “its ‘regions’” (2014, 58). The centre (which is equally the basic domain of embodiment338) is represented by bodily experience; the circles then extend outwards to the “embodied” regions of perception, emotion, higher-order cognitive functions and sociocultural practices. Insofar as the experiential background refers to “every recipient’s personal experience” (which elicits “individual responses to the story”, 64–65), it corresponds – just like Fludernik’s cognitive frames and schemata – to the pyramidal level of virtual narrativity, more precisely to the cognitiveaffective system (i.e. dispositions) of the reader.339 It is only when the potentialities given by the text and the experiential background become actualised, that embodied meanings emerge.340 Insofar as this emergence is due, according to Caracciolo, to the “interaction” between the reader and the text (see Caracciolo 2014, 4, 5, 10, 18), which takes the form of a “network of responses” (30), his approach complies not only with the idea of virtual narrativity, but also with narrativity in actualisation. It is important to note that experiential meaning in Caracciolo’s sense denotes readerly experiences that go beyond the creation of mere mental representations. They include experiential phenomena such as empathy (66), the readerly “enactment”341 (and attribution) of the fictional consciousness of

338 Caracciolo’s “E-approach” (see 2014, 6) insists on “the situated, embodied quality of readers’ engagement with stories and on how meaning emerges from the experiential interaction between texts and readers” (2014, 4, orig. emphasis). 339 Consider how Caracciolo deals with what I call the S/U problem: “In some cases, all my argument needs is that a story could impact readers in the way I describe, even if this effect cannot be generalized across all readers. In other cases, it is the structure of readers’ responses that interests me more than the exact content of those responses, which can vary substantially from reader to reader” (2014, 13). 340 Caracciolo contends that “meaning emerges from the experiential interaction between texts and readers” (2014, 4). 341 Caracciolo (2014) draws on a special current in cognitive science (“enactivism”), whose foundations have been laid by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991). According to Caracciolo, enactivist approaches distinguish themselves

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characters, “sensory images, emotions, [and] evaluations – the stuff our experience is made of, and that cannot be adequately accounted for within a computational model of the mind” (46). Experientiality thus does not correspond to the pyramidal level of resultative narrativity, but rather to the phenomenal summit of my model. This process of locating Caracciolo’s experientiality is not only consistent with his exploration of the phenomenological implications of reading fiction,342 but also with his defence of a “more-than-representationalist” (2014, 10) approach: Caracciolo does not deny the existence and importance of mental representation, but wishes to account for further, non-representational, experiential dimensions, which should complete the picture of narrative reading. Caracciolo’s theory touches, however, not only on the pyramidal level of virtual narrativity, of narrativity in actualisation and on the Pyramid’s summit of narrative meaning, but also on what I describe as “the anthropological (un)ground” of narrativity.

2.4.9 The anthropological (un)ground of narrativity: Narrative conventions, practices, traditions The Pyramid rests on narrative conventions, practices and traditions, which could be called “the anthropological (un)ground of narrativity”. The anthropological dimension refers to the insight that, as Hühn puts it, “[n]arrating appears to be an anthropologically universal device utilized by humans in all cultures and epochs within a wide spectrum of pragmatic and artistic contexts for structuring experience, making sense of the world and of one’s self as well as communicating such interpreted structures through a sign system to others or to oneself [. . .]” (Hühn 2004, 139). Barthes considers storytelling to be a ubiquitous activity and a kind of anthropological constant:

from earlier, computational approaches to the mind that concentrate on how people construct mental representations. Enactivists, by contrast, consider processes of self-organisation: “It is through the interaction (which the authors call ‘structural coupling’) between the organism and the environment that the organism’s environment constitutes itself as such. In turn, the organism is constituted (both ontogenetically and phylogenetically) by the history of its structural coupling with the environment that it helps co-fashion” (Caracciolo 2014, 18). Recently, enactivism has been defined via five criteria: (i) autonomy, (ii) sense-making, (iii) emergence, (iv) embodiment and (v) experience (see Caracciolo 2014, 4). 342 See especially the fourth chapter of Caracciolo’s (2014) study as well as the sixth chapter of Herman’s (2009a) study.

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[. . .] le récit peut être supporté par le langage articulé, oral ou écrit, par l’image fixe ou mobile, par le geste et par le mélange ordonné de toutes ces substances; il est présent dans le mythe, la légende, la fable, le conte, la nouvelle, l’épopée, l’histoire, la tragédie, le drame, la comédie, la pantomime, le tableau paint [. . .], le vitrail, le cinéma, les comics, le fait divers, la conversation. [. . .] le récit est présent dans tous les temps, dans tous les lieux, dans toutes les sociétés [. . .]. (Barthes 1966, 1)343

The Pyramid, however, goes even further; it proposes ubiquitous narrative practices be considered the “ground of narrativity”. In which ways should this formula be understood? How should one conceptualise the relationship between narrativity and narrative practices, traditions and conventions? First of all, what I call the anthropological (un)ground of narrativity can metaphorically be understood as the soil on which narrativity grows – both from a production-oriented and from a reception-oriented viewpoint – insofar as narrativity cannot be separated from the narrative experiences from which it springs, be it daily storytelling practices or literary traditions. Bres has formulated a related idea with respect to the understanding of actions: Comme la langue maille le réel, le met en discontinuité signifiante, constitue une grille qui l’enveloppe et le rend pensable, de sorte que l’homme n’atteint jamais le sens des choses mais le sens donné aux choses, de même, nous semble-t-il, l’action est-elle toujours déjà médiatisée par des récit antérieurs qui font qu’elle n’est appréhendable qu’à travers les catégories du récit, notamment à travers la notion capitale de mise en intrigue. Comme on ne peut regarder le monde qu’à travers les lunettes d’une langue, on ne saisit (Bres 1994, 118–119) l’action qu’à travers les lunettes de mises en récit antérieures.344

In other words, neither the production nor the reception of stories are “innocent” activities, which happen ex nihilo; there are always prior forms of storytelling – practices and norms with which people are familiar –, which inform both the telling/writing and listening/reading of narratives. Caracciolo (2014, 58, 66–68) covers the influence of these practices and conventions by theorising

343 “Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings [. . .], stained glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. [. . .] it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural” (Barthes 1975, 237). 344 “Just like language ties reality, putting the latter into a signifying discontinuity, creating a grid that encloses it and makes it thinkable, such that one can never get to the sense of things, but only to the sense given to things, in the same way, it seems to us, is the action always already mediated by anterior narratives whose effect is that the action is graspable only through the categories of the narrative, notably through the seminal notion of emplotment. Just as one can look at the world only through the lens of a language, one grasps the action only through the lens of anterior narrativisations” (translation mine).

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the “experiential background” of the reader (more precisely, “higher-order cognitive functions” and “socio-cultural practices” of the reader). The understanding of stories thus becomes a matter of both socio-communicative learning and of acculturation, which of course includes the readers’ familiarity with narrative practices. But if narrative conventions and practices are part of the reader’s embodied background, why does the Pyramid separate them from the reader (who is located at the level of virtual narrativity)? First of all, the pyramid proposes to distinguish, not to separate them: the Pyramid’s rhizomatic design identifies and maps crucial dimensions of narrativity, which can and should be connected in various ways. This connectivity is – in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988, 7) “principles of connection and heterogeneity” – the basic idea behind my rhizomatic approach. I do thus share the view that narrative conventions, practices and traditions partake in the cognitive-affective system of readers – and of authors as well. If the Pyramid does not collapse, but distinguishes visually between the reader and narrative practices, conventions and traditions, it is because an important dimension of any particular narrativity, ascribed by an individual reader to a specific text, is its relationship to anterior forms of narrativity. On the side of production, this relationship can be understood as the fact that authors can produce narratives that either correspond to or mark themselves off from established narrative conventions or generic requirements. On the side of reception, readers are often confronted with a broad range of interpretative alternatives.345 Considerations (especially of professional readers) on the relationship between a text and anterior forms of storytelling are very common and play a prominent role in literary studies. Briefly, a text’s intertextuality and its relationship to literary tradition(s) are important measures for the cultural appraisal of a literary narrative text. If one contends that the cultural value of a text contributes to its meaning, then this relationship between texts and the traditions to which they are inextricably connected should be visualised on a map of narrativity. Merging narrative conventions and practices with the “cognitive-affective system of the reader” would obscure this relationship rather than inviting an analysis of it – the more so, as the conventions and traditions that contribute to the generation of a text can differ

345 They can, for instance, interpret texts differently in the light of one or another narrative convention; it is even possible that they consider one and the same text as innovative in the light of a generic tradition or as completely clichéd (see my analysis of interpretations of Toussaint’s novels, section 6.5.2). They can also deny a text its generic status on the basis of anterior forms of storytelling or celebrate it as a new generic species, for instance because it unites different traditions or introduces a new narrative technique.

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significantly from those with which readers (professional readers versus laymen) are familiar. In other words, the knowledge versus ignorance of literary-historical and generic contexts is likely to produce, in many cases, quite different readings (and thus narrativities) and should therefore be a visible factor in a model of narrativity. I agree with Caracciolo’s analysis according to which both professional and non-professional readers read texts in terms of their respective experiential backgrounds.346 Nonetheless, narrative traditions, practices and conventions exist independently of particular readers. Whether readers take such traditions and conventions into account as they interpret a narrative is an important factor in the emergence of narrativities, and as such singled out by the anthropological ground of my pyramidal model. The anthropological ground of narrative practices and conventions plays an important role for the circulatory design of my model as well insofar as narrativities can be said to “sediment”, thus becoming part of the “soil” or background of narrative practices out of which new forms of storytelling subsequently “grow” or emerge. In other words, both narrative texts and the ways in which they have been (publicly) interpreted or imbued with meaning can enter the cultural archive of narrative practices and traditions, thus influencing both the creation and the reception of upcoming narratives.347 Besides these (rather obvious) ways of understanding the anthropological “ground” of narrative practices, there are two further, narratological (rather than narrative) ways of understanding it. The first one concerns the relationship between definitions of narrativity and narrative practices and traditions. As I have discussed in section 2.3, differences in narrative theories can be deduced from the corpus that underlies the respective approach and from what is considered, for instance, as a “prototypical” narrative. It is this insight that is also reflected by the “ground” of the Pyramid since, if the Pyramid is actualised as a narratological definition of narrativity, it is based on a specific set of narratives (e.g. folk tales, consciousness novels, conversational stories, etc.). These narratives determine which (virtual, actual and resultative) dimensions of narrativity will become current in the respective conception of narrativity. The second way of reading the anthropological “ground” has to do with the narratological

346 I also share Caracciolo’s (2014, 5–6) goal “to narrow the divide” between nonprofessional and professional readers. This becomes obvious, I think, in my criticism of the equation of narrativity with resultative narrativity and in my concern for narrativity in actualisation. 347 This is true not only for the milestones of “high” literature: any good detective novel partakes in this circulatory process as well, by upholding (and possibly innovating) a longstanding generic tradition.

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search for the origin of narrativity – an origin that, as I will argue in the following subchapter, cannot be found, such that the ground has to be understood, simultaneously, as an “unground”.348

2.4.10 The vain search for narrativity’s wellspring, or: Narrativity’s dialectic nature The Pyramid of narrativity is constituted by a number of levels and elements and this multiplicity of dimensions poses an important question: Where exactly in the Pyramid does narrativity originate? What is the original source from which narrativity springs? Insofar as the vertical axis of the Pyramid represents a temporal development, “meaning” being the summit and the last stage of this process, one could argue that the origin of narrativity must be found where the whole process begins: at the lowest level of the Pyramid, that is, at the level of virtual narrativity. This, I think, is a false conclusion, but it is important to take it into consideration, since it indeed mirrors the direction that theories of narrativity often take: downwards. Fludernik (1996), for instance, insofar as she defines narrativity via processes of narrativisation, seems to locate the origin of narrativity on the pyramidal level of narrativity in actualisation. But the text-reader interaction described by Fludernik alone does not answer the question of what makes this interaction a narrative interaction. In other words, it does not allow one to grasp the essence (i.e., to locate the origin) of narrativity. If one conceptualises narrativisation as a narrative text-reader interaction, narrativity is somehow already presupposed as a quality of the interaction. I contend that it is this problem of presupposition that triggers Fludernik to continue the search for the wellspring of the “narrative” quality; this search leads her “downwards” in the Pyramid, to the level of virtual narrativity where she implicitly proposes to locate the origin of narrativity: in the cognitive system (i.e., in the narrative frames and parameters) of the reader (see section 2.3.6). But is this really the place where narrativity originates? I wonder where the “narrative” frames and parameters come from. If they are not innate cognitive qualities, what is their source?349 It seems to me that Fludernik’s first-level “real348 I borrow this expression from Askin (see section 2.4.10). 349 That Fludernik does not elaborate on this question seems to be implicitly criticised by Wolf who emphasises the interactive, functional provenience of frames: “Frames are not gratuitous mental constructs but cognitive phenomena which have been developed and are transmitted to serve certain purposes or functions. Any discussion of the frame narrative and its

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life schemata of action and experience” (1996, 372), even though they may be “natural”, become acquired throughout life, beginning in childhood. Her secondlevel natural frames of ACTION, VIEWING, EXPERIENCING, TELLING and REFLECTING may represent very basic, embodied categories, but, as Caracciolo (2014) has convincingly argued, it is experience – the experience of acting, viewing, etc. and of observing others acting, telling, reflecting, etc. – that is at the roots of embodied categories. Concerning the third level of her model, Fludernik herself claims that narratological and generic concepts are “ultimately historically determined interpretative tools” (1996, 372). If so, readerly cognition cannot be the wellspring of narrativity insofar as there must be something prior to the establishment of readers’ narrative-cognitive frames and parameters, namely their embodied interaction with the world, including specifically an embeddedness in narrative contexts and the witnessing of (and participation in) narrative practices. Alasdair MacIntyre (2007), who equally highlights the impossibility of separating man and narrative, speaks therefore about man as a “story-telling animal”: [. . .] man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. [. . .] It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, [. . .] that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. (MacIntyre 2007, 216)

We are thus now arrived at the anthropological “ground” of narrativity: at the narrative practices that always precede (or trigger) the creation of “narrative” cognitive schemata and the reception and creation of actual narratives, which then “sediment” on the ground again. The same movement downwards, from the level of virtual narrativity to the anthropological ground of narrative practices, can also be witnessed in approaches that start by seeking the origin of narrativity in the text. In his reflection on narrative sequence, Barthes (1966), for instance, contends that people’s innate language of narrative emerges from exposure to narratives:

defining quality must consequently take into account this functional or pragmatic aspect [. . .]” (Wolf 2003, 184).

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La langue du récit, qui est en nous, comporte d’emblée ces rubriques essentielles: la logique close qui structure une séquence est indissolublement liée à son nom: toute fonction qui inaugure une séduction impose dès son apparition, dans le nom qu’elle fait surgir, le procès entier de la séduction, tel que nous l’avons appris de tous les récits qui ont formé en nous la langue du récit. (Barthes 1966, 14, second emphasis mine)350

Also Bremond (1966) claims that semiotic narrative structures are anchored in real-life experiences, arguing therefore that semiology is actually rooted in anthropology: Aux types narratifs élémentaires correspondent ainsi les formes les plus générales du comportement humain. La tâche, le contrat, la faute, la piège, etc., sont des catégories universelles. Le réseau de leurs articulations internes et de leurs rapports mutuels définit a priori le champ de l’expérience possible. [. . .] Technique d’analyse littéraire, la sémiologie du récit tire sa possibilité et sa fécondité de son enracinement dans une anthropologie. (Bremond 1966, 76)351

Narrativity thus becomes an essentially ambiguous, janus-faced, dialectical phenomenon. While it is, to a certain extent, predetermined by (or dependent on) the narrative practices, traditions and conventions of the “storytelling animal”, it also reacts to these practices, modifying and challenging existing conventions and traditions. This is where the circular design of the Pyramid enters the picture again: a feedback loop interconnects the “anthropological ground” and the (different levels of the) Pyramid of Narrativity (see Figure 6b).352 Semiotic flows and continuous processes of renewal turn the “ground” of narrativity into an “unground”. This term is borrowed from Askin (2015, 159) who argues, in the context of his differential theory of narrative, that

350 “The conventional narrative language internalized by the reader comes readily equipped with such essential headwords. The self-contained logic which structures a sequence is inextricably tied to its name: any function which initiates a seduction imposes, from the moment it appears, by virtue of what is conjured up by this name, the whole process of seduction, as we have learned through all the narrative acts that have fashioned in us the ‘language’ of narrative” (Barthes 1975, 254, second emphasis mine). 351 “Thus to the elementary narrative types correspond the most general forms of human behavior. Task, contract, error, trap, etc., are universal categories. The network of their internal articulations and of their mutual relationships defines the field of possible experience a priori. [. . .]. Although it is a technique of literary analysis, the semiology of narrative draws its very existence and its wealth from its roots in anthropology” (Bremond 1980, 406). 352 This circularity can be aligned with the semiotic circle that I have proposed in section 1.4. The irreducible diversity of narrative practices is filtered by the irreducible perspectivity of the author, thus engendering new narrative forms and practices, which then become reinserted into the archive of the irreducible diversity of narrative practices again.

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the ground on which this theoretical edifice rests is an unground, un incessant ungrounding: the continuous differentiation and differenciation of difference, or what Deleuze also terms becoming. Narrative as virtual unground amounts to the abyssal swarming of differential elements and their relations. (Askin 2015, 159, orig. emphasis)

What Askin describes here fits perfectly my concept of the anthropological “(un)ground” of narrativity. This (un)ground is “virtual” to the extent to which actual narrative practices shape the realm of narrative possibilities, both in terms of narrative structures that they propose and forms and functions of storytelling that they leave unexplored. It lives by a “continuous differentiation and and differenciation of difference” insofar as circular semiotic flows between familiar and new forms of storytelling have an impact on narrative norms and practices, continuously changing them. These semiotic metamorphoses fuel new forms of storytelling and narrative understanding, which live by new narrative rhizomes, i.e. by new dynamic network connections between “differential elements and their relations”.353 These processes of differentiation make it impossible to pin down a narrative essence or origin, which is the most important implication of the idea of an “unground”. The combination of the ideas of both an anthropological “ground” and “unground” of Narrativity draws attention to the fundamentally dialectic nature of narrativity. On the one hand, pyramidal narrativity can be said to have a ground: it grows out of the soil of the most various “narrative” practices and conventions by inscribing itself into existing traditions (e.g. by imitation, pastiche, use of established narrative structures, practices and techniques)354; but, on the other hand, narrativity incessantly shakes and transforms this “ground”, “ungrounding” it, insofar as it positions itself – quasi meta-narratively – to the various practices and traditions that have engendered it, be it by distancing and distinguishing itself from them (e.g. by satire, parody, irony, or the transgression of conventions) or by positioning itself to them in other, less unequivocal ways.355 Moreover, as Askin (2015) has emphasised, narratives can be 353 The feedback loop between the Pyramid and the anthropological (un)ground – to which I referred earlier as processes of sedimentation (see section 1.6) – is also responsible for what Ricœur calls a “style of development, an order in movement” (1985, 14), which provides intelligibility to historical changes of narrative goals, techniques and modes of expression. 354 Ricœur draws attention to the anthropological fundament of narrativity as he claims that “plot stems from a praxis of narrating, hence from a pragmatics of speaking, not from a grammar of langue” (1985, 44, orig. emphasis). 355 For instance, the question of knowing on which side contemporary “minimalist” French novelists (such as Toussaint) should be arranged is open to debate. Does their “écriture en surface” (Fauvel 1998, 620; see also Regn 1992) or their “trash” (Claudel 2012, 137; Blanckeman 2012, 147) have the aesthetic depth of a literary-historical statement or does it suggest a literary

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shown to reflect on their own constitution and possibility of existence, i.e. on “their very own virtual conditions” (Askin 2015, 160), for instance by questioning, through a meta-narrative performance, “the threshold between subjective representation [. . .] and objective expressivity” (161)356 or the unity of the narrative voice (see 163–165). If such a meta-level positioning towards prior forms of storytelling and the corresponding virtual possibilities of narration is really constitutive for narrativity, then it has to be made visible in a model of narrativity. The Pyramid aims at visualising this aspect by (un)grounding the Pyramid of narrativity on narrative practices, which, for their part, create the virtual possibilities of narrative. Some of these virtual possibilities become actualised in the textual system (on the first level of the Pyramid), which, for its part, provides virtualities of narrative meaning-making (in the text-reader interaction). Narrative practices, conventions and traditions represent then an anthropological constant, which determines and engenders new narrative instantiations and becomes, in turn, renewed by them. Narrative practices are also a specific “context” of narrativity (see Figure 6).

2.4.11 Contexts: Outer boundaries as spheres of semiotic exchange The Pyramid of narrativity is surrounded by diverse contexts. The anthropological ground of narrativity represents one of these contexts (namely “narrative” contexts, understood as human practices and conventions of storytelling, including literary texts and traditions). In order to explain the emergence of narrativity, a range of further contexts has to be taken into account. Jannidis et al. (2003, 21–23) propose distinguishing between three kinds of contexts, which are generally invoked by theories of meaning: (i) actual-historical, (ii) semantic and (iii) medial contexts. Historical contexts cover factors such as folk, nation, class, sex and gender (“Geschlechter”, 21), culture, censorship and market. Semantic contexts refer to an existing archive of typifications and codes,

depth that is not really there? Is it, as Claudel (2012, 138) describes his impression of Toussaint’s novel Faire l’amour, “d’une portée pseudo-philosophique”, “une littérature [. . .] qui joue à faire intelligent, [. . .] qui joue à nous faire croire qu’elle est littérature” (139)? The discussion itself reveals that the examination of the narrativity of particular novels goes hand in hand with an examination of the relationship between the text and narrative traditions and conventions. Moreover, concepts of literariness that give the debate an evaluative, literarycritical dimension come into play. 356 See also my analysis of Toussaint’s meta-narrative negotiation between the subject, narration and the real (section 6.3.3).

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including language, genre, discourse, intertextuality and episteme. Finally, Jannidis et al. claim that, following theorists such as Kittler or McLuhan, the medial dimension of communication can be considered as a context in its own right, which either restrains or enables the meaning of semiotic signs.357 Medial contexts concern, for example, the opposition between orality and literality as well as “performative” aspects (e.g. performances of plays, see 23). This classification of contexts can be adopted for my model. Each dimension of narrativity – emerging at whatever pyramidal level and in whatever degree of zoom – is embedded in a variety of contexts, which all influence the entities and dynamics of the Pyramid. For example, considering the level of virtual narrativity, not only the author’s socio-historical and biographical background can be considered to be a critical context of the textual system, but also, eventually, other oral or written texts produced by the author. Or consider hyperlink narratives: their digital-textual form is enabled by the medial contexts from the late twentieth century. One level higher, at the stratum of narrativity in actualisation, educational contexts can be of special importance since how readers interact with texts – for example, the ways in which they take socio-historical or literary contexts into account – depends both on their familiarity with (different sorts of) texts, their reading experiences and proficiency, their scholarly or academic education and/or the (personal or professional) goals, attitudes and kinds of procedural knowledge with which they approach the respective text. Indeed, one has to contend, with a side-glance to Caracciolo (2014), that all embodied experiences that enter the reader’s “experiential background” can become a context for the text-reader interaction. These experiences can also be considered to give birth to quite different resultative narrativities and meanings. In narrativity theory, one of the semantic contexts enumerated by Jannidis et al. is of special importance, namely other (non-narrative) genres and types of discourse. Their importance resides in the fact that they mark, so to speak, the “outer boundaries” of narrativity.358 Many scholars agree that defining narrativity implies providing distinctive criteria, which allow one to determine “what distinguishes it [narrativity, ESW] from other genres or text types” (Sternberg 2010, 507). As far as I see, the three most discussed kinds of boundaries are those that concern the relationship between narrative and . . .

357 Veel’s (2009) study speaks for this hypothesis. 358 See, e.g., Mathieu-Colas (1986); Genette (1966).

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(i) . . . drama359 and poetry360 (genre-related boundary), (ii) . . . fiction and historiography361 (truth- or reference-related boundary) and (iii) . . . description and argument (text-type related boundary).362 Going into the details of this discussion would by far transgress the boundaries of the present chapter, but I would like to present at least one thought according to which these other (generic, text-type etc.) modes of expression can be taken into consideration not only as something that has to be distinguished and analytically separated from narrativity, but also as something that interferes with narrativity – and narratology – semiotically. Lotman’s (2001) model of semiospheres may be interesting in this regard. At the beginning of the ninth chapter of Universe of the Mind, Lotman states that the drawing of boundaries constitutes one of the basic mechanisms of semiotic individuation; the semiotic sphere constitutes itself by distinguishing itself from an Other, which is excluded from its inner space. (Lotman exemplifies this idea by drawing on the temporal and spatial boundaries and peripheries that structure the fictive worlds of literary narratives: vampires, for example, which represent a frightening Other – the Non-Human –, are nocturnal creatures who occupy the temporal margins of human life.363) Lotman also 359 See, for example, Jahn (2001), Nünning and Sommer (2008). 360 For an overview, see Hühn and Sommer (2014). See also Hühn (2004) and Butor (1964a). 361 According to Fludernik, fiction “provides readers with experiences that they cannot have on their own – and this constitutes the fascination of all narratives” (1996, 256). She identifies overlaps between historiography and fiction (see 25), but nonetheless decides to “tentatively exclude[] historical writing from the central realm of prototypical narrativity” (1996, 26). She therefore takes a counterposition to White (1996), especially to his notion of narrativisation (see Fludernik 1996, 34). Wolf (2003, 182) criticises Fludernik’s theory for its exclusion of historiography from her concept of narrativity. For overviews on the relationship between narrative, historiography and/or fiction, see Fulda (2014) and Schaeffer (2014). 362 Genette, for instance, links the opposition between description and narrative to the opposition of (syntagmatic) time and (paradigmatic) space: “la narration s’attache à des actions ou des événements considérés comme purs procès, et par là même elle met l’accent sur l’aspect temporel et dramatique du récit; la description au contraire, parce qu’elle s’attarde sur des objets des êtres considérés dans leur simultanéité, et qu’elle envisage les procès eux-mêmes comme des spectacles, semble surprendre le cours du temps et contribue à étaler le récit dans l’espace” (1966, 158). Chatman (1978), for his part, contends that “the narrative may have very little or even no overt description; but a narrative without an agent performing actions is impossible” (1978, 34). See also, for example, Barthes (1968), Bremond (1966), Chambers (1994), Chatman (1990), Frank (1978), Schmid (2003), Sternberg (2010, e.g. 644) and Warning (2001, 179). For an overview on the question of text types, including argumentative texts, see Aumüller (2014). 363 This was true at least at Lotman’s time, before Stephenie Meyer turned the vampire into a sparkling accessory.

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highlights the fact that the boundaries of a semiosphere, because they border on other semiospheres, are places of permanent exchange; where foreign semiotic orders permeate the boundary, they can stimulate changes at the periphery of the semiosphere. There are two ways of applying Lotman’s theory to narrativity theory. Firstly, one can conceive of narrativity as a (narrative) “semiosphere”.364 According to this view, narrativity can be considered to represent a specific, “narrative” semiotic code, which is surrounded by other semiospheres, that is, by other (descriptive, argumentative, dramatic, poetic, etc.) semiotic orders. Insofar as Lotman’s theory claims an exchange and interference of codes at the periphery of the semiosphere, it seems natural that one can encounter various “hybrid” texts, which seem to come into being at the periphery of the narrative semiosphere, constitutively combining narrative and outer-narrative features – be it a poetic-narrative ballad, such as Goethe’s “Zauberlehrling” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”), or an argumentative-narrative novel, such as Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities).365 Concerning the boundary between narrative and description, Genette has come to the conclusion that the boundary between these two “antithetical attitudes” is indeed fuzzy.366 It is possible to think of such interferences of semiotic codes as the problem of knowing which mode predominates the textual gestalt – a question that has been discussed, since Russian Formalism, under the heading of “the dominant” (see Abbott’s [2014, 601–602] section about narrativity as “a mode among modes”).367 A more interesting move would perhaps consist of examining the concrete ways in which the narrative and the non-narrative textually coalesce, interact and transform each other in a mutual exchange of forms and functions. A second way of applying Lotman’s theory to the subject is to consider narratology as a semiosphere. Indeed, narratology seeks to define its own semiotic

364 See section 1.4. 365 See Gnüchtel (2016). 366 “Si la description marque une frontière du récit, c’est bien une frontière intérieure, et somme toute assez indécise” (Genette 1966, 158). 367 See also Sternberg’s defence of the idea of the narrative dominant: “I distinguish [. . .] the constants of narrative in its narrativity, a law unto itself, from the variables of narrative in its textuality, which includes a range of extranarrative components, dimensions, patterns, effects. The generic and the general once distinguished in principle, they flexibly compose into a whole according to the text’s (or the reading’s) order of priorities. The more dominant the narrative force, the more will the variable rest integrate with the teleology unique to it, rather than going their own way, let alone pulling the other way. One may then properly name the text after its dominant, without conflating either narrativity with textuality or the elementtypes that have been synthesized by rank order in the finished product” (2001, 116).

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space, both by drawing (and discussing) the boundaries between narrative and non-narrative forms of discourse and by extending its own boundaries. Nünning and Sommer making a case for a “narratology of drama” and, respectively, for a “transgeneric” (2008, 346) narratology, for example, somehow seeks to broaden the narrative semiosphere by expanding it into the realm of drama (and dramatic theory). Hühn’s (2004) transgeneric-narratological approach to poetry, by contrast, explicitly rejects the idea of “subsum[ing] poetry into narrative fiction”; instead, Hühn wishes “to use their common features as a means of exploring both the similarities and the differences between these two broad genres and, specifically, of highlighting the distinctly poetic forms and functions narrativity can adopt in lyric poems” (2004, 140). Obviously, the problem of drawing the boundaries of narratology, that is, of determining the objects of research of narratology, brings us back to the problem of drawing the boundaries of narrativity. Mathieu-Colas argues that there are two such boundaries of narrativity, i.e., two essential criteria, which exclude a semiotic object from the realm of narrative analysis if they are not fulfilled: (i) the “eventful configuration” (“figuration événementielle”, 1986, 106–108), which implies the narrative factors of representationality and temporality, and (ii) “discoursivity” (“discursivité”),368 i.e. emplotment: the discursive manifestation of stories, be it verbal, iconic or gestural (see Mathieu-Colas 1986, 108–109). Drawing the “outer” boundaries of narrativity thus seems to amount to the identification of the essential features of narrativity – but, as we have seen so far, there are many different ways of defining narrativity, especially in view of its various “inner” boundaries. We are touching here on what I consider to be one of the “hard” problems of narratology. While I can unfortunately not offer a satisfying solution to this dilemma, I do hope to provide a model that allows such problems to be “mapped”. Concretely, the Pyramid can conceptualise the problem of the outer boundaries of narrativity both as a question of semiotic differentiation, overlap and exchange between the pyramidal stages of narrativity and its various semiotic (descriptive, argumentative, etc.) environments or contexts; and as a question of the narratological setting of (theoretical, epistemological, probably even institutional) priorities on different strata, dimensions or elements of the Pyramid. If the “outer boundaries” of narrativity correspond (as it turns out) to the ways in which one positions oneself to the various “inner boundaries” of narrativity, then the limits of narrativity and narratology are – and must be – extremely flexible and dynamic and dependent on the observer.

368 “[. . .] le récit n’existe de manière effective que pour autant qu’il y a discours” (MathieuColas 1986, 108).

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2.5 Limits and blind spots of the pyramidal model Given that a great part of the confusion about the notion of narrativity is due to the (irreducible) perspectivity of the researchers (their research interests, biases and so forth), it is important to me to highlight the perspectival limits and implications of my own model as well, as far as I am aware of them. I would thus like to finish the explanation of my pyramidal model by exploring aspects that reveal a subjective bias or choice of me, as a researcher, and that cannot (or are not designed to) be covered by my framework. Concretely, I would like to discuss (i) the theoretical (reception- rather than production-oriented) focus of my model and (ii) its epistemological (rhizomatic) orientation, that is, its focus on dynamic connections. I will also discuss the fact that my model does not offer a definition of narrativity and that it focuses on literary narratives.

2.5.1 Theoretical orientation: The sides of production and reception What leaps directly out when viewing the Pyramid of narrativity is the fact that it does not include the author in the virtual level of narrativity. Leaving the author out of my model will probably raise a suspicion according to which I defend a purely reception-oriented approach and deny the importance that authorial intentions and decisions, narrative enunciation and communication – that is, “rhetorical” dimensions – have for narrativity and/or narrative meaning. This is a serious criticism, since, according to Kindt and Müller (2003a), an important criterion for the quality and usefulness of narratological models is their neutrality with regard to theories of interpretation: The conceptional apparatus has to be assembled in such a way that it remains compatible with a broad range of interpretive orientations, enabling it to be used equally by exponents of structuralism, intentionalism, reception theory, feminism and other academic approaches to the interpretation of literary works. (Kindt and Müller 2003a, 212)

My answer to such a criticism is based on two arguments. My first argument highlights the temporal and ontological differences that exist between the processes of text reception and text production. As to the temporal level, the process of readerly reception obviously follows on the process of authorial creation: in literary communication, readers are confronted with a text that has already been created by the author. But if so, why not add another level to the Pyramid, located underneath the level of virtual textuality, in which the author finds a place? I wonder whether this is really necessary inasmuch as the narrative text bears the “traces” of the decisions made previously by the author. During the

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process of creation, the author is confronted by many possibilities as to what and how he writes; the author and the text are thus indeed in a state of virtuality during the writing process. As the author makes his decisions, he actualises this virtuality. The text is thus the result of the actualisation of a virtuality,369 a process that takes place on the threshold between the anthropological ground and the virtual level of the Pyramid (see section 2.4.5; 2.4.9). The textual system can thus perhaps be understood as the result of another Pyramid of authorial creation, which is not only temporally, but also ontologically prior to (i.e., a condition of) the text’s existence. When the author has given the text its ultimate gestalt (and meaning), the Pyramid of authorial creation is completed and its result – the text – is inserted into a new pyramidal cycle, becoming one of the two constitutive elements of virtual narrativity in the process of reception (see Figure 6). The author and the process of creation are thus somehow recursively implied by the Pyramid in terms of a temporally and ontologically precedent process, which produces the narrative text. I have not visualised this production-oriented Pyramid of narrativity in my model because it is implied by the systemic, circular design of the Pyramid and its principle of zoomability, provided that the Pyramid exists per definitionem of different systemic (temporal and ontological) levels, which can be explored by zooming into its various elements. As one “zooms” into the textual system, the ontologically and temporally embedded pyramid of production emerges. My second argument for not including the author in the level of virtuality touches on another aspect of the author: s/he can be considered not only as the producer of the text, but also as one of the regulating principles of textual interpretation. We are thus entering the difficult, “slippery slope” of the debate on authorial intent, which spans between two extreme positions370: one that denies the author any authority over the text371 and one that sees the author as the ultimate instance of textual meaning.372 Although these questions, which also touch on the debate about the existence of an implied author, are presently regaining

369 The same could be said, with regard to oral narratives, about the process of enunciation. Bres, for instance, who defends a linguistic-enunciative concept of narrativity, develops practically the same threefold model, constituted by a virtuality (“puissance”), actualisation (“actualisation”) and effect (“effet”): “on peut considérer la langue comme puissance, le discours comme effet, le passage de la première au second s’opérant dans le temps opératif de l’actualisation. Au niveau de la production narrative, on considérera que, sur la clôture initiale, le thème narratif est en puissance ; sur la clôture finale, il est en effet” (Bres 1994, 110). 370 For a short overview on the debate on authorship, see Jannidis et al. (1999). 371 See Wimsatt and Beardsley’s seminal contribution (1946). 372 See, for example, Hirsch (1967).

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importance in narratological discussions,373 the Pyramid is designed to be neutral with respect to this question. Such neutrality, however, requires a possibility to include the author into the readerly processes of meaning-making. Where in the Pyramid can the author as an instance of meaning be found? There are, as far as I see, three possibilities. Firstly, the author is implied by the Pyramid of production, connected to the textual system (see above). Secondly, authorial meaning or intent can be located in the cognitive-affective system of the reader – not only because it is the reader who develops hypotheses about authorial intent, but also because evidence of authorial intent (e.g., authorial comments in diaries or letters) has to be found and integrated by the reader into his or her stock of knowledge. As soon as the reader disposes of this knowledge, the latter forms part of her or his dispositions, which, for their part, influence the way s/he interacts with the text. Authorial intent can thus be included in the level of virtual narrativity, which then can account for the “rhetorical” design of narrative as an intentional act of communication.374 Authorial meaning can, thirdly, also be derived from evidence of authorial intent (the author’s notes, commentaries on or rewritings of her/his texts, etc.). Such evidence of authorial intent can be included into my model under the (more universal heading of) “contexts” (see section 2.4.11).

2.5.2 Epistemological orientation: Definition versus rhizome Besides the reception-oriented design of my model, there is a further, significant objection, which can be raised against the pyramidal model (and which actually concerns its epistemological orientation): I do not offer a definition of narrativity.

373 To give just a few hints: Herman argues that “anti-intentionalist claims should [. . .] be attacked at their root” (2013b, 57–58). Darby argues that “the controversial narratological abstraction of implied authorship represents the only point at which a negotiation between textual and contextual worlds can logically take place” (2001, 829). See also the discussion of this issue between Herman, Phelan and Rabinowitz, Richardson and Warhol in Narrative Theory. Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012) and the fifth chapter of Lotman’s (2001) Universe of the Mind. 374 Such a Boothian rhetorical concept is defended by Phelan and Rabinowitz: “As rhetorical narrative theorists, we look at narrative primarily as a rhetorical act rather than as an object. That is, we see it as a purposive communication of a certain kind from one person (or group of persons) to one or more others. More specifically, our default starting point is the following skeletal definition: Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (in Herman et al. 2012, 3).

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There are generally two sides to the project of defining narrativity. On the one hand, one could define narrativity “negatively” by what it is not, thus drawing its “outer boundaries”. In section 2.4.11, I have touched on the fundamental problems that such a project of negative definition poses. On the other hand, one could define narrativity “positively”, i.e., grasp its essence by pinning down its substantial features or components. Although I have already repeatedly elaborated, throughout chapter 2, on the difficulties that the requirement of such a positive definition brings with it, I would like to leave some final comments on this subject here, connecting it with the epistemology that underlies my study. First of all, I would like to pin down concretely what the Pyramid offers instead of a positive definition of narrativity. Insofar as I draw a pyramidal map of narrative possibilities, I do not answer the question of what narrativity (always) is, but of what it can (possibly) be. I have elaborated on this virtual design already at the outset of my pyramidal approach (see section 2.4.1), arguing that, from my point of view, my spatial model allows one to reconcile the diversity of both narrative textual forms and of the readers’ subjective judgments on – or experiences of – “narrativity” with the theoretical goal of developing a unified virtual notion of narrativity. But why, one could insist, do I not offer at least a minimal definition of narrativity in order to give at least an approximate idea of what it means to narrate something? Why do I not simply adopt, for example, Phelan and Rabinowitz’ following “skeletal definition”: “Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (in Herman et al. 2012, 3)? First of all, this definition is not as “minimal” as it may appear, since it has a quite rhetorical bias.375 Rather than it itself giving substance to narrativity,

375 The definition has a two-part structure. The first part (“Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes”) is centred on the communicational, rhetoric frame of narrativity; the second part (“that something happened to someone or something”) on narrative content. The first part reveals a “rhetoric” bias insofar as it conceptualises narrative primarily as an intentional (“for some purposes”) act of communication (“somebody telling somebody else”) in a specific situational context (“on some occasion”). The second part, devoted to narrative content, is indeed less focused by the definition, conceptualising narrativity quite generally in terms of eventfulness (“that something happened”) and, say, experientiality (“to someone or something”). Most of the elements of the definition are underspecified. This problem of underspecification concerns, on the one hand, the main part of the definition, that is, the level of communication or discourse. If we think of literary narratives, what does the definitional “somebody” refer to? To the real author, to an implied author, to the narrator or to an intradiegetic character who tells a “hypodiegetic” story? What is also not taken into consideration by the rhetorical part of their definition is the doubled

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the first part of the definition enumerates implicitly some aspects of discourse and communication (authorial intention, the context of production and communicative participants), which could or should be interpretatively explored in the course of reading a narrative. It represents thus a kind of definitional formula with many variables (each of which is, by the way, covered by the Pyramid as well). Also the second, less elaborated part of the definition (in the subordinated clause) does not specify narrativity in terms of its content. The definition requires, quite generally, that narratives represent a certain degree of eventfulness – “that something happened to someone or something” –, but it does not clarify how this criterion should be understood. What does it mean that something “happened”? When and under which circumstances is something a (“tellable”) event?376 If Lotman (1977, Ch. 8) is right in assuming that something becomes a tellable event if it represents a deviation from the norms of a given system or worldview, then the criterion of eventfulness or tellability invokes the contexts of the author and of the receiver, and thus requires the interconnection of various elements of narrativity. While this interconnectivity is the most important dimension of the Pyramid of narrativity, it is not made explicit by the definition given above. Secondly, the minimal definition presented above is primarily representationalist, and there are many narratives whose performative designs do not comply with a representationalist definition. To give just a few, short hints as to the literary limits of the definition: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La salle de bain, for example, defies the criterion of eventfulness or tellability (see section 6.2), implied by the last part of the definition (“that something happened to someone”).

frame of literary communication. While in conversational narratives the participants partake in the same situation and communicative frame, literature can be connected to distinct situations of narrative production and reception, with centuries spanning between the two situations. Consequently, there is not one, but a doubled (namely an authorial and a readerly) “occasion” for narrative communication – a fact that is ignored by the definitional formula “on some occasion”. The same can be said for the “purposes” of the narration: authors and readers can pursue very different purposes, but readerly purposes do not play a role in the definition. Moreover, the authorial purpose, even if it is abstractly included into the definition, is never simply given, but can only be inferred hypothetically through interpretation. The same can be said about readerly purposes, which, for their part, are extremely diverse, even if one has agreed on a common goal such as “interpretation” (see Bühler 1999). 376 Kafalenos, for example, argues that “interpretations of events are contextual and depend on the other events in the configuration in which a given event is perceived. I assume that an interpretation of an event may change whenever the configuration in which it is perceived expands (or decreases) in response to new information” (1999, 39).

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Kafka’s narratives, for their part, challenge in various ways the criterion of factuality, implied by the definition (“that something happened”), inasmuch as they obscure, for example, the events that take place in bureaucratic institutions (e.g. in the court or in the castle), although they play a very important role in the intradiegetic universe (since they decide somehow over the fate of the protagonists). Indeed, what is presented by Kafka’s novels are ways in which the main characters try to come to terms with being exposed to happenings whose causes and meanings (briefly: whose coherence) remain totally obscure. In Das Schloss, readers cannot even be sure of “what happens” in the novel, and that despite of the fact that they accompany K. everywhere. But do not even obscure, “incoherent” happenings fulfil the definition according to which narratives tell “that something happened to someone”? This is a legitimate objection, but the point is that this formula insinuates that narratives live primarily by the eventful contents that they convey; it thereby misses the particular and specific quality of many narratives. Kafka’s narrativity, for instance, deconstructs almost systematically each of the terms of the minimal definition: readers and protagonists cannot (i) grasp what it is that happens377; (ii) know whether something eventful really happens (or has happened) or not378; (iii) determine who the protagonist (“someone”) is379; nor (iv) decide whether something really happened to someone or whether someone makes something happen.380 Or consider Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste: the novel repeatedly announces the narration of “something” that “happened” – namely Jacques’s love story –, but only in order to defer this narrative content throughout the whole novel. The novel gains its satirical power indeed from its rejection of (contemporary literary norms of) eventfulness. Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie, for its part, takes the whole definition to its limits. In this novel,

377 The Trial, for instance, narrates primarily Joseph K.’s vain attempts to understand the nature of his “trial”. 378 Even if something eventful seems to happen, this eventfulness is later denied. For example, K. conceives of the first letter that he receives from the castle as an important event. This eventfulness is later put into question by the Superintendent. In The Trial, the trial itself, as an event, remains obscure, not only because it is not clear what exactly has caused the trial (see the first sentence of the novel), but also because K. has not been arrested. The event itself is deprived of its usual event components. Moreover, The Castle is indeed less the narration of a tellable action than a narration of narrations. The novel is primarily constituted by various characters who tell each other stories and spread rumours. 379 In The Castle, it is more than questionable whether K. is really the land surveyor he claims to be. 380 As Liebrand (2004) has pointed out, it is Joseph K. who bells in the morning for his dish (“Gericht”), “the dish” being in German the same word as “the trial”.

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readers do not know who speaks, on what occasion, for which purpose and about what. It is nearly impossible to reconstruct a coherent story, a “something happened to someone” out of the repeated descriptions of modified settings and micro events. I am not the first person to point to the limits of such minimal definitions. Richardson, for instance, highlights the fact that “antimimetic” narratives do not comply with such definitions: “If a natural narrative consists of someone telling someone else that something significant has happened within a recognizable storyworld, an antimimetic narrative may contest each of the terms in this statement“ (in Herman et al. 2012, 22, emphasis mine). But are “antimimetic”, experimental or “unnatural” narratives not marginal cases? Do they not display a low degree of narrativity? This is indeed a vital question. Fludernik, for example, conceives of conversational storytelling as the prototypical centre of narrativity. She thereby necessarily displaces modernist and experimental forms, despite her declared intention to account for them, at the margins of a virtual space of prototypical narrativity. This marginalisation is indeed the reason why experimental, difficult texts have to undergo narrativisation at all: they need to become more narrative than they are at the “periphery” of narrativity. Richardson, by contrast, who opposes mimetic and antimimetic narratives (and, correspondingly, natural and unnatural narratology), conceptualises the two sides as anti-poles with equal narrative vigour and legitimacy. In his approach, narrativity has two centres (which are dialectically intertwined): a mimetic, natural and an antimimetic, unnatural centre, the latter having been abandoned by narrative theory: In nearly all approaches to narrative theory, past and present, there is a significant and unusual gap: a sustained neglect of antimimetic narratives and, most importantly, an absence of comprehensive theoretical formulations capable of encompassing these works. Most narrative theories are thus substantially incomplete. Nearly all are based on mimetic presuppositions and start from the position that narrators are rather like human storytellers, that characters resemble people, that the settings and events we encounter in a narrative are comparable to those we might meet up with in life, and that readers process characters and events in a work of fiction roughly in the same manner that they comprehend people and events in daily experience. (Richardson in Herman et al. 2012, 21)

According to Richardson’s “expanded model for the study of narrative”, we need instead a “dual or oscillating conception of narrative” (Richardson 2015, xvi), which does justice to both mimetic and antimimetic narratives. Narrativity thus seems to be structured, according to Richardson, not by a single, prototypical core, but by two, one being represented by somehow “conventionalist” narratives, the other by narratives that do not follow narrative conventions, thereby challenging norms of coherence and narrative expectations. This reconceptualisation

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of narrativity in dual (or rather dialectic) terms is, in my view, the considerable added value of Richardson’s approach insofar as it saves certain modernist, postmodern and other experimental or “defamiliarising”381 literary narratives from being downgraded in narrativity. Instead, the unnatural, antimimetic features are cherished as a part of their specific, literary narrativity. The Pyramid offers a theoretical framework that is, on the one hand, capable of encompassing both mimetic and antimimetic narrativities – be it as two different narrative traditions or sorts of practices, which can be found in the “(un)ground” of narrativity, be it as pyramidal Narrativities, which either inscribe themselves into or negate existing (e.g. mimetic) traditions. The question to know whether the narrative “depict[s] the world of our experience in a recognizable manner” (Richardson 2015, 3) can be located, in pyramidal terms, on the level of virtual narrativity, as a correspondence or contrast between the textual and the readerly system. This contrast, for its part, can be related to the divide between representationalist and performative narrativity, which can be correlated with the pyramidal stages of narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity: representationalist, mimetic narratives have a strong link to the resultative stage of narrativity insofar as they allow readers to build up a mental model. Strongly performative and antimimetic texts, by contrast, primarily have a bearing on narrativity in actualisation, since they aim to resist the straightforward creation of a narrative gestalt and hold the reader in processes of coherence in progress. By covering both mimetic and antimimetic, representationalist and performative kinds of narrativity, the Pyramid does not endorse the competition between the two concepts of narrative and between the corresponding (“natural” versus “unnatural”) narratologies; instead, it integrates them into the same framework, considering them as variations emerging from the pyramidal space of narrative possibilities. The aim of my model is thus to explore the complex network of conceptual connections and interdependencies out of which particular narrative manifestations (can) emerge. This aim is somehow inconsistent with the project of “defining” narrativity, especially if we take the implication of the verb into account: the verb “define” comes, from the Latin word dēfïnīre and means, inter alia, to “determine the boundary or spatial extent of; to settle the limits of”.382 The focus of the present study, however, is not to draw the boundaries of narrativity

381 As Richardson observes, “defamiliarization is a typical concomitant of many antimimetic descriptions, scenes or events” (2015, 24–25). 382 “define, v.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. Accessed 20 September 2019. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/48874?redirectedFrom=de fine. See entry 2a.

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such that one could decide, on the basis of certain criteria, on the “narrativehood” of a text – that is, on whether a text is a narrative or not, because, on the one hand, judgments of the narrativehood (and also of the narrativeness) of a text can be expected to differ from each other, depending on the reader’s prior knowledge, reading competence, habits and the context. On the other hand, what is more interesting, from my point of view, than the very alternative between “narrative” and “non-narrative” is the question of knowing in terms of which dimensions a text is judged to be (more or less) narrative (or non-narrative), interesting or boring, good or bad. Which complex interconnections between various narrative dimensions do texts and readers create due to which narrative dynamics and with which effects? Which narrative dimensions are ranked highly by which readers and which kinds of texts fulfil these requirements? These are the questions raised by the Pyramid of narrativity. Instead of providing a normative definition of narrativity, in the sense of narrativehood or narrativeness, the pyramidal model allows us to analyse, on a meta-narratological level, in which ways the various narratives and competing definitions of narrativity differ from each other, which dimensions they include versus exclude, highlight or conceal, but without prioritising, by itself, one over another. To define means also to “make definite in outline or form” (see entry 2b of the article “define” in the Oxford English Dictionary Online) and to “determine, lay down definitely; to fix, decide” (see entry 4a). While narrativity can become “definit” in the particular readerly experience of a particular text, narrativity as a concept cannot be made “definit” in my understanding without leading to significant exclusions and normative implications; it is thus better theorised as a space where narrative potentialities can be actualised. Accordingly, narrativity, as an extended concept, can neither be “fixed” nor “decided”: it is an essentially dynamic notion insofar as the choices of authors and readers decide upon narrative forms, functions, processes and meanings. Finally, if definition means to “to set forth or explain the essential nature of something” and to “state exactly what (a thing) is” (see entry 6a, emphasis mine), then I have to reject the project of defining narrativity all the more, since, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “[t]he tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (1988, 25). Basing my framework on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ideas, I contend that narrativity is neither a thing nor an essence, but an effect of the rhizomatic interconnection of textual aspects and readers’ dispositions and processes of the creation of coherence and literary norms and so forth. Insofar as each of these interconnected elements is by itself a complex entity, constituted

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by the interplay of diverse elements, the idea of an essence has to be replaced by that of a dense, rhizomatic web of various interlinked, embedded and interacting entities and dimensions. In other words, if there is an essence of narrativity, it consists of rhizomatic, dynamic, “living” interconnections. Insofar as this rhizomatic view can be aligned with what Capra (1996) calls “systems thinking” – a way of thinking “in terms of connectedness, relationships, context” (29) –, it is opposed to Cartesian, “analytic thinking”, or, more precisely, to the “belief that in every complex system the behaviour of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its parts” (Capra 1996, 29). This “systemic” (or “ecological”) epistemology of my approach, which is linked to complexity theories, can be ascribed to my own (irreducible) perspectivity as a researcher, but perhaps it also yields evidence of my partaking in the more general, transdisciplinary “paradigm shift” (from analytic to systems thinking) that Capra observes. Indeed, it seems to me that systemic approaches and the wish to account for the complexity of narrative are progressively gaining ground in narratology. Pier has very recently argued that “narrative itself is a complex system and that narratology, in at least some of its past and more recent phases and dimensions, is implicitly or latently a complexity theory in its own right” (2017, 533). He exemplifies his argument by identifying a form of narrative sequentiality, which is “commensurable with the principles of complexity theory” and which operates “along the lines of narrative’s information theoretical and entropic processes” (550–551). While Pier primarily analyses the complexity of the narrative itself (“the global narrative cannot be predicted on the basis of its sequences, any more than the sequences can be formally deduced from the global story”, 2017, 558), others have placed emphasis on the interaction between the narrative system and the system of the human body. Already Fludernik (1996, 12) had related the concept of the “natural” “to a framework of human embodiedness”. Caracciolo (2014), for his part, gives even more weight to the “embodied” dimension of narrative experientiality, conceptualising the latter “as a kind of network that involves, minimally, the recipient of a narrative, his or her experiential background, and the expressive strategies adopted by the author” (2014, 49). Interestingly, as Capra (1996, 10) notes, the network is the “central metaphor of ecology” and of systems thinking, providing “a new perspective on the so-called hierarchies of nature” (28): “Since living systems at all levels are networks, we must visualize the web of life as living systems (networks) interacting in network fashion with other systems (networks)” (Capra 1996, 35).

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The network metaphor is indeed in wide use in narratology, used to describe not only the history of (narrative) literature383 and of narrative theory,384 but also of narrative or narrativity itself, including definitional methods. Concerning the nature of narrative, Sternberg (1990) criticises, in the first essay of his Telling-in-Time series, that structuralism fails to acknowledge the network nature of narrative: Structuralist narratology turns out, on the whole, a formalism in disguise, often contrary to its professions and its textual analyses alike. A strange mixture results – and differently mixed in different hands, phases, even performances – but almost invariably with a strong element of form reified, instead of related to a network of synchronic and diachronic relations as part to whole. (Sternberg 1990, 907)

Correspondingly, in the second essay, Sternberg claims that “the system of narrative consists in a vast network of many-to-many relations” (1992, 483). Kafalenos (1999), for her part, focuses on the network built up by the events of a story: Understanding that events are related requires at least some understanding about how they are related. For one to be able to grasp a number of events as a configuration entails being able to grasp individual relationships between event and event, and between event and configuration. These individual relationships, when combined, form the network that seeing-events-together implies. (Kafalenos 1999, 39)

Also Ryan highlights the importance that the network of events has for narrative: “This network of connections [between physical events, causal relations and mental states and events, ESW] gives events coherence, motivation, closure and intelligibility, and turns them into a plot (logical, mental and formal dimension)” (2005a, 4). Accordingly, Ryan also contends that, whenever events “are not held together by a complex network of logical relations but by the temporal links of chronological succession as well as by the thematic links of a common setting (annals) or common participants (chronicles, diaries)” (1992, 376), one has to assume a special form of narrativity – namely “embryonic narrativity”. The idea of a network and connectivity has also been used as a means to describe the way in which narrativity can be defined. Rudrum, for instance,

383 Richardson, for instance, contends “that a scrupulous account of the literature of any interesting period should resemble less the regular branches of a family tree than unruly rhizomatic shapes that never repeat themselves” (2015, 138). 384 In his “genealogy of early developments”, Herman conceives of the history of narrative theory as a “network of historical tendencies that conspired to make narrative theory what it was and is” (2007, 20).

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who has argued out differences with Marie-Laure Ryan in the journal Narrative, explains: There is no one set of distinguishing properties or features, let alone rules, that make a game a game, nor is there one that makes a narrative a narrative either. What there is instead, in both cases, is ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing’ [. . .]. (Rudrum 2006, 201)

This idea is neither far from Ryan’s (2006, 193) “scalar conception of narrative” (according to which “definition becomes a series of concentric circles that spell increasingly narrow conditions”) nor from her proposal to define narrativity via nine “nested conditions” (insofar as they shift, towards the bottom of the list, from semantics to pragmatics). Rudrum therefore sympathises with this idea, but criticises its essentialist remnants: “The idea is at first blush an attractive one, but it would be better expressed using Barthes’s image of the onion: a series of concentric circles around a hollow centre [. . .]. Without this proviso, we end up establishing an absolute rather than a relative standard of narrativity” (Rudrum 2006, 202). Although I agree generally with Rudrum’s anti-essentialism, I do not think that his claims bring us much further in our understanding of narrativity. Rudrum summarises his claims as the “using-as” argument according to which “a text is a narrative if it is commonly used as a narrative” (Rudrum 2006, 198, orig. emphasis) by the linguistic community. Surely, this is not wrong, but it does neither allow one to pin down differences between such uses nor to analyse what exactly constitutes narrativity according to one or another use. Wolf’s (2003) transmedial approach is very close to network models and to my rhizomatic model insofar as each of his “narratemes” is inextricably intertwined with many other narratemes. To give an example, the narrateme “anthropomorphic being” (e.g., a protagonist) has to be considered as a constitutive element of the narrateme “action”. The narrateme “intentionality” can be considered as a part of both the narrateme “character” and the narrateme “action”. The plot, which results from actions performed by characters, is an important part of the thematic unity of the story – and so on. If we consider the summary that Wolf gives at the end of his article (see 188–189), we even see that his model is rhizomatic sensu stricto, since the three-fold classification of narratemes, which he offers (see section 2.3.3), resembles, in my eyes, a dynamic systemic network: the “building block” narratemes form its knots (possible world, anthropomorphic beings, events, etc.); the “syntax-rules narratemes” create (chronological, causal, teleological, thematic, etc.) connections or relationships between these knots and thus (the possibility of) a narrative whole; the “main narratemes” (experientiality,

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representationality and [potential of] meaningfulness) are the emergent385 features of the working of this network as a whole: Even if details of the narrative world and its constituents are given, this would still not be sufficient for a typical narrative, for these constituents must be brought into some intelligible connection with each other. It is only by creating or suggesting intelligible coherence among its components that narratives can fulfil their third fundamental quality besides experientiality and representationality: this third quality [. . .] is a tendency towards meaningfulness that is based on the existence of sense-making or cohesive devices [. . .]. (Wolf 2003, 186)

It is the implicit idea of a “network” of narratemes and the explicit emphasis on the connectivity of narratemes386 that represents a major overlap bet -ween Wolf’s approach and my Pyramid. There are, however, two significant differences between them, linked to Wolf’s definition of narrativity in terms of textuality and representationality. Firstly, Wolf presents his narratemes as textinternal properties: narrativity is a number of textual constituents and of “cohesive devices” between them; they jointly constitute his “main narratemes”, which are also presented as text-immanent properties. The Pyramid of narrativity, by contrast, considers meaning as an effect that emerges from the interplay of the textual system and the cognitive-affective system of the readers. Secondly, by centring his approach on representationalist narratives, Wolf is forced to marginalise certain forms of literary narrativity387 and to downgrade pyramidal narrativity in actualisation. He clearly favours a primarily “resultative” conception of narrativity according to which narratives “create the impression of closure” (2003, 187) and are “one of the most powerful tools [. . .] to give meaning to our existence as beings conscious of time” (185). Wolf himself defends (and thus recognises) the limits that this representationalist bias creates:

385 As Pier (2017) and myself (2017) have noted, emergence is one of the key concepts of complexity theory, since, as Pier notes, “[a] complex system is capable of emerging behavior. [/] Emergence occurs when attention is switched from one scale to a coarser scale above it. [. . .] Moreover, when combined, structure and emergence result in self-organization, the production of a new structure” (2017, 537). Briefly, “[a]t issue are nonlinear forms of causality and the spontaneous self-organization of complex reactions between the units of a system” (541). 386 “Representationality and experientiality are achieved by equipping the narrative world with basic constituents or content elements that are connected in specific ways. Both the content elements and their connections enable and condition narrative experientiality and constitute further important narratemes” (Wolf 2003, 186, emphasis mine). 387 See Wolf (2003, 194, note 51).

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If this seems too conservative a conceptualization of narrativity, we must bear in mind that, according to my prototypical approach, we are dealing here with narratives displaying a high degree of narrativity, and that the gradability of narrativity does not exclude, for instance, open-ended stories from the field of narratives. (Wolf 2003, 187)

If one analyses Wolf’s position in terms of the Pyramid, one sees that he attempts to legitimise the ambiguity of his approach by ascribing a high degree of narrativity (as well as prototypicality) to the stage of resultative narrativity and a low degree of narrativity to the stage of narrativity in actualisation. In order to defend this decision, which brings about a neglect of certain forms of literary narrativity, he is forced to marginalise certain forms of literary narrativity.388 As the analysis of Wolf’s approach shows, the rhizomatic model of pyramidal Narrativity allows for the revision of existing approaches to narrativity with regard to their hidden, rhizomatic qualities (Wolf’s narratemes as a network), to counterbalance one-sided theoretical foci (Wolf’s textualist conception of narratemes) and to understand the interplay of chaos and order in terms of the possible (but by no means necessary) emergence of narrative order and meaning. To conclude, I hope to foster a narratology that, in contradistinction to the narratology criticised by Gibson, does not shy away from “think[ing] of narrative as heterogeneous, a composite or mobile multiplicity” (1996, 216) and that takes account of the complex, dynamic interconnections and transgressions that inhere in narrativity: Erzählungen sind [. . .] sprachliche Artikulationen von Veränderlichkeit. Sie sind in ihrem Aufbau zu dynamisch, indeterminiert und komplex, um sich vollständig in Reihen von Oppositionspaaren gliedern zu lassen. Statt in binäre Strukturen eingefasst werden zu können, gehen sie solchen Strukturverfestigungen vielmehr voraus. Durch ihre NichtFestgelegtheit und innere Unruhe stellen sie Zugänge zu einem kulturellen Fluidum her,

388 According to Wolf, “one must refrain from giving overdue importance to marginal, nonprototypical cases such as the modernist consciousness novel” (2003, 184). Attacking Fludernik (1996) more explicitly, Wolf explains: “To model a theory of narrativity on a small segment of more or less exceptional, experimental, narratives such as the modernist consciousness novel is methodologically questionable, especially from the point of view of cognitive frame theory, otherwise adopted by Fludernik: frames, after all, are derived from prototypical, not from marginal phenomena” (Wolf 2003, 194, note 51). This criticism does not do justice to Fludernik’s broad corpus, which extends “from storytelling in the oral language to medieval, early modern, realist Modernist and postmodernist types of writing” (Fludernik 1996, xi).

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in dem binäre Codes sich allererst ausbilden, in Konkurrenzen oder Allianzen eintreten, sich wechselseitig schwächen, stärken, kreuzen, verfestigen oder auflösen. (Koschorke 2012, 22)389

⁂ The present chapter has pursed the goal of providing an overview on the debates and problems that are connected with the definition of narrativity, offering a sort of macro-model, which should allow for the mapping of both narrativity’s various dimensions and its corresponding narratological approaches. The “Babylonian Tower”, introduced at the beginning of the chapter, illustrates the diachronic dynamics of the notion’s narratological history and the related problem of conceptual ambiguity. In my analysis of the “inner boundaries” of narrativity, I focus on basic oppositional pairs, which can be considered to structure and divide both the notion of narrativity and the field of narratology. The pyramidal model, finally, offers a systematic virtual gestalt of the dimensions that partake in the notion of narrativity, serving simultaneously as a map on which narratological positions and definitions can be located according to the narrative elements on which they are based. The Pyramid, which has a rhizomatic (i.e. dynamic, connectivist) and circular design, proposes to order the notion of narrativity according to its virtual, actual and resultative stages; moreover, it integrates the phenomenal dimension of meaning into the notion of narrativity and takes the feedback loop between narrativity and precedent (and subsequent) narrative practices, conventions or traditions into account. The Pyramid deals with the basic problem of subjectivity/specificity and universality (S/U problem) by integrating both the reader (with all of his subjectivity, individual dispositions, capacities and experiences) and the text (in all its specificity) into the model. Text-reader interactions are at the core of the model: they engender narrative dynamics, which can principally span the whole range between very subjective dynamics (e.g. empathy with or sympathy for a particular character) to the more universal ones (e.g. suspense). The entirety of dynamics can – but does not have to – lead to the establishment of an integrated narrative gestalt (e.g. a storyworld, a plot network, situation model

389 “Narratives are [. . .] linguistic expressions of mutability. They are architecturally too dynamic, undetermined and complex to be analysed in terms of conceptual oppositions. They do not correspond to binary structures, but precede the establishment of such fixed structures. It is through their non-determinateness and inner upheaval that they connect to a cultural fluid in which binary codes evolve in the first place, competing against or allying themselves with each other, weakening or empowering each other, [thereby] gaining stability or fading away” (translation mine).

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and the like) and to the emergence of a global narrative meaning. My analysis has underlined one aspect of narrativity in particular. I have argued, against some representationalist approaches, that narrativity cannot be restricted either to its virtual or to its resultative dimension, but needs to be understood also as an essentially dynamic phenomenon (narrativity in actualisation).390 My model is neither designed to heighten the Babylonian Tower by providing a further definition nor can it replace existing definitions. Instead, it provides a conceptual framework – a kind of macro-model – with which definitions of narrativity can be understood better, namely systematically, in terms of the pyramidal dimensions that they include or exlude, take into consideration or leave out. In other words, the Pyramid should allow not only to better understand narrativity (its dimensions, levels and dynamics), but also to better evaluate the scope of definitions of narrativity. I would like to exemplify this function of the model, using as an example the multifactorial definition of narrativity that Caracciolo (2014) has recently presented: A semiotic object is likely to be understood as a story when 1. it prompts recipients to construct a storyworld populated by characters and structured around a specific temporal-causal logic (plot); 2. it possesses a certain degree of thematic coherence; 3. it relates events that deviate from recipients’ expectations, thus acquiring ‘tellability’ [. . .]; 4. it focuses on the experiences and evaluations of one or more anthropomorphic entities. These narratemes cut across the distinction between representation and experience, with factors 1. and 2. seemingly leaning toward representation, factor 3. siding with experience, and factor 4. somewhat in between. (Caracciolo 2014, 32)

The pyramidal model allows us to see that Caracciolo . . . – . . . conceives of narrativity basically as a text-reader interaction (“A semiotic object [. . .] prompts recipients to [. . .]”); – . . . attempts to classify criteria according to their place at the virtual level of narrativity: in the textual system ( “a storyworld”, “thematic coherence”) or in the cognitive-affective system of the reader (“recipients’ expectations”, “prompts recipients to construct”); – . . . concentrates on the reader, his/her experiential background and the way the latter influences his/her understanding of the semiotic object, thus focusing on the virtual level of narrativity; – . . . includes coherence into his account, but understands coherence as a resultative textual property (“possesses a certain degree of thematic

390 But which forms does narrativity in actualisation take? How can it be further theorised? These questions will be addressed in the following chapters.

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coherence”, emphasis mine) rather than as a dynamic, processual entity, thus ranking resultative narrativity over narrativity in actualisation; – . . . includes event-related knowledge (that is, scripts) into his definition (“it relates events that deviate from recipients’ expectations”)391; if this idea is meant to refer to generic norms of tellability, Caracciolo’s approach touches on literary traditions or conventions (i.e., on the anthropological ground); – . . . does not include intertextual influences and processes of literary generic renewal (implied by the circular dimension of the Pyramid) into his definition.392 If the pyramidal model provides scholars with a tool to better orient themselves in the confusing diversity of definitions and of narrative factors, it has fulfilled its purpose. Nonetheless, if I am right in assuming that all semiotic processes, including those taking place in the present study, imply an “irreducible perspectivity” (see chapter 1), my rhizomatic, pyramidal framework offers a gestalt that is surely tainted by my subjective perspective and that, consequently, will have, besides the limits that I am able to recognise, further “blind spots”. I am sure, the narratological community will not fail to find and expose them. Such productive criticism will hopefully bring us nearer to the goal, so often declared by various narratologists and certainly pursued by me, of theorising narrativity in such a way as to ground our discipline on a consensual notion, working against what Nünning describes as the postclassical “erosion of any structuralist consensus” (2003, 246).

391 At least if one assumes that it is such practices that engender the readers’ expectations. 392 But Caracciolo explains elsewhere that “literary narratives are those that – in a given culture and time – are seen as having the highest potential for revealing and restructuring readers’ background at the socio-cultural level” (2014, 73).

3 Narrativity and Coherence: Towards an Analysis of Literary Narrative Dynamics 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.1.4 3.2 3.3

Coherence: Some interdisciplinary insights 236 Coherence in text linguistics 236 Coherence in discourse linguistics 241 Coherence in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science Coherence in literary theory (Iser) 271 Narrativity in actualisation, coherence and literariness Narrative dynamics: Between theory and interpretation

255 275 285

3.1 Coherence: Some interdisciplinary insights Linguists assign a crucial role to coherence. Graesser, McNamara and Louwerse, for instance, “believe, based on years of research, that processing coherence relations is a cornerstone of comprehension” (Graesser et al. 2003, 82). Taboada notes that “[o]ne of the fundamental issues in the study of discourse is the phenomenon of coherence. [. . .] In discourse studies, coherence is often described as the way in which a discourse is sewn together, with pieces relating to other pieces” (Taboada 2009, 127). In view of the close connection and interdependence of coherence and the comprehension of text and discourse, it is necessary to take a look at linguistic conceptions of coherence.

3.1.1 Coherence in text linguistics The most basic distinction that one encounters nearly everywhere in the literature about coherence is the differentiation between coherence and cohesion. This distinction has developed throughout the years as a result of the need to separate terminologically different “relations of connectedness” (Bublitz 1998, 2), which initially where conflated within the term of coherence. Already in 1989, Viehweger differentiates between three historical stages of the term coherence: coherence (i) as a “text grammar” (Viehweger 1989, 257), (ii) as a “semantico-thematic notion” (257) and (iii) “functional pragmatic coherence” (258): The first models [. . .] understood coherence as a property of texts resulting from the recurrence of certain semantic features (semes) in reference-identical language signs or from the semantic connection of propositions or parts of propositions and appearing at the text surface by isotopic chains, semantic condensates, connectives and other coherenceinitiating means. [. . .] In the context of the text-linguistic reorientation in the mid-70ies, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-004

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this restrictive notion of coherence [. . .] was given up and replaced by a semanticothematic notion of coherence. From then on, coherence was understood as a property of texts which can be adequately described and explained only in connection with the theme of a text [. . .]: A text is coherent if the individual propositions can be integrated into the textual theme [. . .]. With the development of communicative or action-oriented text models, coherence was redefined as a much wider notion. [. . .] With the more pronounced orientation of the notion of coherence towards the communicative function of language, towards the goals tried to be attained by a speaker by his speech act in concrete contexts of action [. . .], a concept of coherence developed which can be called functional coherence or functional pragmatic coherence. (Viehweger 1989, 257–258, orig. emphasis)

Viehweger’s first category can be subsumed under the heading of cohesion, while coherence covers the pragmatic aspects brought into play by the third category. Viehweger’s second category could possibly be ranged on either side, depending on whether the theme of the text is made explicit by the text or whether it has to be inferred by the reader. Bublitz explains the difference between cohesion and coherence as follows: Though both cohesion and coherence refer to meaning resting on relations of connectedness (between individual propositions and sets of propositions), which may or may not be linguistically encoded, they are descriptive categories which differ in kind. Cohesion refers to inter-sentential semantic relations which link current items with preceding or following ones by lexical and structural means [. . .] As cohesion is anchored in its forms, we can argue that it is an invariant, user and context independent property of a piece of discourse or text. Coherence, on the other hand, is a cognitive category that depends on the language user’s interpretation and is not an invariant property of discourse or text. (Bublitz 1998, 2, emphasis mine)

The distinction between cohesion and coherence thus depends on an alternative: either the text itself provides a specific connectedness between two or more propositions (i.e. this connectedness exists “objectively”, manifesting itself in the text) or it is absent from the text and has thus to be interpretatively added by the reader. This distinction, however, is not as unproblematic as it may seem, since not everything that is not explicitly stated in a text (i.e. that appears on the text surface) is not objectively there. As Linke and Nussbaumer (2000) explain, literal meanings may be both explicit and implicit. For example, if someone says that s/he has succeeded in doing something, s/he implicitly also says that s/he has made an effort (see Linke and Nussbaumer 2000, 437); and if A claims that B commits adultery, then A’s utterance implies that B is married (see 438). These are examples of “semantic presuppositions”, which the authors count among implicit phenomena that are part of the literal meaning of texts (called “implicit I” by the authors). Other implicit literal meanings are “implications” (e.g. selling implies buying, see 439) or connotations. Explicit and implicit

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literal meanings are part of the linguistic domain of semantics, since they are fixed by convention and independent of specific context. Implicit nonliteral meanings (labelled “implicit II” by the authors), on the contrary, are the subject of pragmatics, since they are highly dependent on specific uses in various contexts. Examples of implicit nonliteral phenomena are “pragmatic presuppositions”, i.e. presuppositions that do not inhere in the semantics of a word or sentence, but in the systems of knowledge of the speaker or hearer (general world knowledge: frames, scripts, schemata, but also intertextual, contextual, or text-type specific knowledge). Also “conversational implicatures” as defined by Grice (i.e. inferences that a speaker wants the reader to draw on the basis of the principle of cooperation) pertain to the nonliteral “implicit II”. The authors thus claim that comprehension always relies both on the decoding of literal meanings and on further knowledge-based activities such as the drawing of inferences, the establishment of hypotheses and processes of interpretation. The authors illustrate their claim by comparing the meaning of a text with an iceberg. In this analogy, the tip of the iceberg represents the explicit parts of the conventional, fixed, literal meaning. The much larger rest of the iceberg, which is hidden under the surface, corresponds to implicit (both literal and nonliteral) text meanings (see Linke and Nussbaumer 2000, 436). The problem of distinguishing between explicit and implicit parts of textual meanings also plays a crucial role in the distinction between cohesion and coherence. As far as I see, there is no consensus according to which one could align Linke and Nussbaumer’s threefold classification (explicit, implicit I, implicit II) with the cohesion-coherence distinction. However, as Schwarz (2001) summarises, Hatakeyama, Petöfi and Sözer proposed in 1989 a three-fold model that could perhaps be related to Linke and Nussbaumer’s classification. According to Schwarz, the authors propose to distinguish between three kinds of connectedness, namely between “grammatical, semantic, and conceptual continuity” (Schwarz 2001, 18): “They define connexity as the connectedness at surface level and cohesion as a connexity that depends on sense-thematic relations, whereas coherence is regarded being the compatibility the interpreter expects from the extra-textual correlate” (17, orig. emphasis). But Schwarz disagrees with this suggestion, preferring “one overall concept of coherence which includes information internally represented within the text as well as information externally added through knowledge activation and inferences” (18). Schwarz’s notion of coherence is consistent with that of other researchers who conceive of coherence as the superordinate term that embraces all kinds of “explicit and hidden, syntactical, semantic and pragmatic signals and structures that warrant the unity of meaning between sentences and larger chunks of a text” (Blumenthal 1997,

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114, translation mine). According to Blumenthal, the most important factors of coherence are grammatical cohesion, semantic or referential cohesion, world knowledge and inferences. Although Blumenthal thus subsumes cohesion under coherence, he implicitly underlines the importance of distinguishing the two terms as he maintains that the interest in text linguistics lies in examining the degree to which different texts rely upon explicit versus implicit forms of coherence. Also Schwarz distinguishes between explicit and implicit coherence, the latter being assigned to cases where there is no overt connectedness, but where connections can be established by a plausible “conceptual interrelationship”: “a global theme or connector may integrate seemingly disconnected events into a continuity relation” (Schwarz 2001, 16). What comes into play here is what Bublitz calls a “hermeneutic, context and interpretation-based” (1998, 10) view of coherence according to which coherence is a “mental notion which is interactively negotiated within a given socio-cultural setting and less dependent on the language of discourse or text itself” (11): According to this view, coherence is not a discourse or text inherent property, i.e. it is not given in discourse or text independently of interpretation. Consequently, one cannot say “a text has coherence” in the same way as one can say “a text has a beginning or an end”, or indeed, “a text has cohesion” (the latter being a text inherent property). We can only say “someone understands a text as coherent”. (Bublitz 1998, 11)

Schwarz positions herself against such a notion of coherence, which includes interpretation, arguing that interpretation (especially the interpretation of literary texts) goes beyond the establishment of coherence. Coherence [. . .] is not a criterion to distinguish a text from a non-text1 because there are natural texts which are not coherent but still perform a communicative function. This is especially evident in literary texts. Therefore, there should be a differentiation between the process of establishing coherence (conceptual continuity within the text-word model) and the process of interpretation, which is not so much dependent on coherence but, rather, on the overall sense and function the reader assigns to the text. (Schwarz 2001, 20)

In other words, Schwarz defends a conception of coherence that includes inferences (such as the “conceptual elaboration of the text base” in cases of “underspecification”, see 20), but that preserves the authority of the text. Reader activities that aim at establishing coherence are supposed to be governed by the text. This is

1 Here, Schwarz alludes to de Beaugrande and Dressler who, in their seminal Introduction to Text Linguistics (1983: 1–13, especially 4), place coherence among the “seven standards of textuality” that serve the “communicative” function of texts.

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why she distinguishes between “text competence” and “text interpretation”, including only the former into her concept of coherence (see 16). The idea of competence implies successful versus unsuccessful performances, or, in the present context, “right” (competent) versus “wrong” (incompetent) inferences. That is, the instance that is implicitly supposed to decide upon the correctness of the respective performances is the text itself. While this is an understandable position, especially if it is adopted from a text linguist, I cannot forestall wondering whether, how and where this line of demarcation between competence and interpretation can or should be drawn since, as soon as one admits that a lack of textual cohesion may be counterbalanced by the use of world knowledge, the readers’ use of knowledge structures becomes a matter of degree. In other words, “[t]o ask people whether or not an isolated sequence of utterances ‘has coherence’ is tantamount to asking whether or not they have enough imagination to come up with a context in which the sequence is indeed coherent” (Bublitz 1998, 7). How much imagination may one use in order to create a meaningful unity out of a sequence? How many extratextual assumptions may one make, how much background knowledge may one take into account before “text meaning” is transformed into a meaning that has emancipated itself from the text? One cannot prevent noting that these are questions that are mainly negotiated in the theory and practice of interpretation – a fact that casts doubt on Schwarz’s proposal to erase interpretive activities from the notion of coherence. The debate surrounding the distinction between cohesion and coherence reveals that the concepts of coherence and narrativity are characterised by the same problem, namely that of knowing where (on the continuous scale between the text and the reader) they are located (see section 2.3.3). How much of the narrativity of a specific narrative comes from the text, and how much is due to the reader’s (more or less “competent”) drawing of inferences and her/his own interpretative activities? Is the idea of “competence” even applicable to coherence (and narrativity), or do we have to speak rather about a “performance” (see sections 2.1 and 2.3.6)? The linguistic discussion that evolves around the terms “cohesion”, “coherence”, the “implicit” and the “explicit” all concern this problematic of locating coherence, and researchers defend divergent positions within this debate. While some text linguists, such as Schwarz, defend positions in favour of locating coherence, by tendency, on the side of the text (at least inasmuch as the text is considered as the instance that governs coherence), psycholinguistic approaches, which I will discuss in the next section, tend to locate coherence in the reader, focussing on the construction of mental representations.

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3.1.2 Coherence in discourse linguistics “Several decades of research have revealed text comprehension to be a highly complex cognitive process that involves most areas of cognition: perception, working memory, long-term memory, problem solving, and imagery” (Zwaan and Singer 2003, 114). Schema theory has made an important contribution to the understanding of reading and discourse processing. As a theory about knowledge, schema theory overlaps with psychology (questions of intelligence, memory and perception), but has also played an important role in AI2 research. The term schema was introduced into psychology by Bartlett in 1932 (see Bartlett 1977), but can conceptually be traced back to Kant (see Rumelhart 1980, 33). As Rumelhart (1980) explains in his seminal essay, schemata “truly are the building blocks of cognition”, that is, “fundamental elements upon which all information processing depends” (33, orig. emphasis). They can be understood as “data structures” or “packets of knowledge” (34), which are stored in memory: There are schemata representing our knowledge about all concepts: those underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions and sequences of actions. A schema contains, as part of its specification, the network of interrelations that is believed to normally hold among the constituents of the concept in question. (Rumelhart 1980, 34)

Schemata can have various degrees of conreteness or abstractness and do not specify each and every detail of the represented knowledge structure. They are constituted by “a configuration of subschemata corresponding to the constituents of the concept being represented” (37). Schemata can specify various relationships between these constituents, for example “spatial and functional relationships” (47). Moreover, schemata have “variables”3 (35) or “slots”4 (as they are called in frame theory),5 that is, conceptual vacancies, which are specific to each schema and which are filled by concrete “values” when the schema is instantiated.

2 As Rumelhart notes, “schemata resemble procedures or computer programs. Schemata are active computational devices capable of evaluating the quality of their own fit to the available data” (1980, 39). See also Schank and Abelson (1977, Ch. 8). 3 “The internal structure of a schema corresponds, in many ways, to the script of a play. Just as a play has characters that can be played by different actors at different times without changing the essential nature of the play, so a schema has variables that can be associated with (bound to) different aspects of the environment on different instantiations of the schema” (Rumelhart 1980, 35). 4 “The descriptions associated with a frame are called slots. A slot consists of a slot-name and a slot-filler” (Reichgelt 1991, 147). 5 The notions of schema, frame and script overlap and deviate from each other to different degrees, depending on the approach under consideration. Schemata and frames overlap in

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Rumelhart underscores the fact that schemata serve interpretative goals: “the central function of schemata is in the construction of an interpretation of an event, object, or situation – that is, in the process of comprehension” (1980, 37). If our perception of reality (or of any kind of experience) can be matched with the structures provided by schemata, the corresponding schemata have helped to interpret reality. According to Rumelhart, schemata are thus somehow similar to theories: they offer hypotheses on how the world is and the successful application of schemata corroborates these hypotheses. This interpretive function provides schemata with a procedural dimension: “a schema should be viewed as a procedure whose function it is to determine whether, and to what degree, it accounts for the pattern of observation. [. . .] a schema theory is [ . . . .] a procedural theory of meaning” (39, orig. emphasis). This is a fairly complex process if one takes the multi-levelled structure of schemata into account, since a schema is “a network (or possibly a tree)6 of subschemata, each of which carries out its assigned task of evaluating its goodness of fit whenever activated” (39). Rumelhart therefore underlines the active, processual and interpretive nature of a schema: its “primary activity [. . .] is the evaluation of its goodness of fit” (39). There are two ways in which schemata can be activated: top-down or bottom-up. One speaks about top-down (or concept-driven) processing when “a schema is activated and it, in turn, activates its subschemata”, due to “a sort of expectation that they will be able to account for some portion of the input data” (41). Bottom-up (or data-driven) processing happens “whenever a subschema that has been somehow activated causes the various schemata of which it is a part to be activated” (42). Rumelhart elaborates also on the adaptability of our knowledge structures, listing three ways in which schemata can develop (namely by [i] the storage of new information, [ii] continual, experience-based modifications or [iii] the learning of new or the restructuration of existing schemata, see 52).

their aspiration to denote basic chunks of knowledge, as Reichgelt’s explanation of frames shows: “Frames are structures that represent knowledge about a limited aspect of the world. Examples are knowledge about chairs, [. . .] about a child’s birthday party” (1991, 144). Sometimes frames are opposed to scripts in order to distinguish knowledge about static entities (e.g. chairs) from sequences of action (e.g. birthday party). Schank and Abelson (1977) are an important reference when it comes to scripts. 6 Rumelhart’s indetermination considering the arborescent versus network structure of schemata reveals the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s epistemic reflections on this alternative (see chapter 1). It should be noted that Minsky votes for conceptualising a frame (which is conceptually quite close to Rumelhart’s notion of the schema) “as a network of nodes and relations” (Minsky 1975, 212).

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Schemata play an important role in discourse processing. According to Rumelhart, “the process of understanding discourse is the process of finding a configuration of schemata that offers an adequate account of the passage in question” (47). He identifies “at least three reasons” as to why readers might fail to interpret a passage correctly: 1. 2.

3.

The reader may not have the appropriate schemata. In this case he or she simply cannot understand the concept being communicated. The reader may have the appropriate schema, but the clues provided by the author may be insufficient to suggest them. Here again the reader will not understand the text but, with appropriate additional clues, may come to understand it. The reader may find a consistent interpretation of the text but may not find the one intended by the author. In this case, the reader will ‘understand’ the text but will misunderstand the author. (Rumelhart 1980, 48)

Rumelhart does not take account of the possibility that impaired discourse comprehension or interpretative failure, provoked by the activation of inconsistent schemata or by the use of deviant schema structures, may be communicatively intended.7 Minsky’s (1975) frame theory, by contrast, discusses this possibility with regard to the invention of new narrative frames. Starting from the idea that there might be a “conventional frame for ‘story’ (in general) [which] would arrive with slots for setting, protagonists, main event, moral etc.” (1975, 236), he understands the processing of the story as a process by which lower-level structures (e.g. sentences) become increasingly conceptually integrated into higher-level frames, thus creating a “growing meaning-structure” (236). “As the story proceeds, information is transferred to superframes whenever possible, instantiating or elaborating the scenario” (236). “But what if no such transfer can be made because the listener expected a wrong kind of story [. . .]?” (237). We go on to suppose that the listener actually has many story frames [. . .]. First we try to fit the new information into the current story frame. If we fail, we construct an error comment like “there is no place here for an animal.” This causes us to replace the current story frame by, say, an animal-story frame. [. . .] But if many previous assignments do not so transfer, we must get another story frame. If we fail, we must either construct a basically new story frame [.. .] or just give up and forget the assignments. (Presumably that is the usual reaction to radically new narrative forms! [. . .]) (Minsky 1975, 237)

7 Cook (1994), however, elaborates on this possibility (see section 3.2). Moreover, according to my analyses in Part B of this study, the composition of certain literary texts (such as those of Kafka and Toussaint) suggests that they are not designed either to simply match with existing cognitive schemata or to allow for the quick, effortless construction of a new interpretative schema (see chapters 5 and 6).

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Minsky thus underscores the importance of narrative frames and concedes that authors can (intentionally) deviate from existing narrative frames, thus renewing the narrative genre.8 Graesser, McNamara and Louwerse (2003) try to come to terms with the complexity of text comprehension by establishing a list of nine generally accepted key assumptions about how the mind functions according to theories of reading and cognition, based on information sources,9 memory stores,10 reader goals,11 local and global coherence12 and explanation.13 A further key assumption is that “[w]hen readers comprehend text, they mentally build meaning representations at multiple levels” (2003, 88). The authors identify five levels that are generally assumed to play a role in meaning representations: (i) surface code (the exact wording and grammar of the sentences), (ii) text base (the meaning of the clauses that are explicitly given in the text), (iii) mental model (the ideas or microworld of what the text is about, including implied meanings and inferences based on world knowledge), (iv) text genre (basic categories are narrative, expository, persuasive and descriptive texts) and (v) communication channel (acts of communication between the reader and the writer, including a global theme, message or point) (see 90).

According to the authors, “[a] text is coherent when there are adequate connections and harmony both within levels and between levels” (90). As to the construction of coherent mental representations formed during reading, recent research reviews discuss primarily four theoretical models, which converge (or can at least be considered as compatible) in some of their substantial 8 His assumption complies with the rhizomatic connections that, in the Pyramid of narrativity (see figure 6b), connect narrative conventions, traditions and practices with the cognitiveaffective system of the reader, which in turn determines the processes of narrative coherence in progress and leads (possibly) to the creation of a renewed narrativity, which finally “sediments”, due to the dynamics of a semiotic feedback loop, by becoming integrated into the “(un)ground” of narrativity again. 9 Information sources are (i) the explicit text, (ii) relevant background knowledge and (iii) the communication context that situates the reading of the text. 10 Namely (i) short-term memory, (ii) working memory and (iii) long-term memory, with all three interacting with language and discourse processes. 11 Readers are considered to pursue genre-specific, general comprehensive and/or idiosyncratic goals. 12 “Local coherence is established when clauses next to each other in the text can be connected coherently. Global coherence links larger chunks of text” (Graesser et al. 2003, 90). 13 “A proficient reader attempts to explain why events in the text occur and why the author explicitly mentions particular information in the text. Such explanations include motives of character’s actions, causes of events, and justification of claims” (Graesser et al. 2003, 90).

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claims: (i) Kintsch’s epoch-making ‘construction-integration theory’, (ii) van den Broek et al.’s ‘Landscape Model’, (iii) Gernsbacher’s ‘Structure Building Framework’ and (iv) Zwaan, Langston and Graesser’s ‘Event-Indexing Model’ (see also the overview presented by Gerrig and Egidi 2003). These four approaches will be briefly presented on the basis of recent research reviews. The following summary is supposed to lay a theoretical, psycholinguistic basis for my approach to narrativity inasmuch as the Pyramid places special emphasis on the obstacles that readers may encounter as they attempt to build coherent narrative mental representations of texts (narrativity in actualisation). I will conclude my research review by turning to some elements of these theories that are the subject of debates. (i) Kintsch’s construction-integration model. Walter Kintsch’s (1988; 1998) construction-integration theory claims that discourse processing proceeds via cycles, since “a reader cannot psychologically construct and integrate the text representation of a long text” (Tapiero 2007, 17). “During any given processing cycle, only a small portion of the text is being worked on. Each processing cycle consists of different subcycles. The first of these subcycles is the construction phase; and the second is the integration phase” (Traxler 2012, 193). The rules that govern the construction phase produce “a network in which relevant information as well as redundant, inappropriate, and even contradictory information may be activated”, since “[t]he basic mechanism for knowledge activation is assumed to be associative” (Tapiero 2007, 16). The network that results from the construction process involves nodes from the reader’s knowledge net, i.e. concepts and propositions (see 16). “It is only at later stages of processing” – namely in the integration phase – “that non-useful or irrelevant associated information becomes deactivated” (Traxler 2012, 194). During the subsequent integration phase [. . .], activation accumulates in the network propositions that are most highly interconnected with one another. In this process, there is a deactivation of contextually inappropriate concepts. [. . .] The processes of the integration phase modify the original coherence network to produce an enduring long-term memory representation of the text. (Zwaan and Singer 2003, 84–85)

This long-term memory representation consists of three levels of representation: The surface form model represents the exact words in the text and their syntactic relations. The text-base represents a set of connected propositions extracted from the surface form. The situation model includes information directly and explicitly stated in the text plus information that comprehenders supply themselves in the form of inferences. (Traxler 2012, 199, emphasis mine)

The construction of a coherent situation model is “the ultimate goal of the construction-integration system, as it is with most comprehenders” (Traxler 2012,

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189). The situation model is “a mental representation of the state of affairs denoted in a text” (Zwaan and Singer 2003, 85), e.g. “a mental simulation of the events in a story, and it captures a number of different features of the real or imaginary world that the text is about, including space, time, causality, and characters’ emotional states” (Traxler 2012, 192), thereby establishing global coherence. The Pyramid of narrativity (see figure 6b) is highly consistent with the assumptions of construction-integration theory. They share the assumption that the construction of coherence (i) starts from the interaction between the reader and the text, (ii) that this interaction takes the form of a network of connections, both within the cognitive-affective system of the reader and between the textual and the cognitive system; (iv) that processing proceeds via cycles (the Pyramid’s “circulatory design”, see sections 2.4.1 and 2.4.4) and (v) that the ultimate goal (and possibly the successful result) of the various dynamics of construction and integration is a narrative schema or gestalt (on the level of resultative narrativity), here called the “situation model”. (ii) Van den Broek et al.’s ‘landscape model’. Although Traxler does not mention van den Broek et al.’s (1996) landscape model in his overview, Tapiero (2007) attaches considerable importance to this theory, considering it to be representative of a “third generation of models”. The first generation of models, such as schema theory and story grammars, “emphasized the mental representation of texts”, giving “substantial weight to the reader’s prior knowledge and expectations” (Tapiero 2007, 11). The second generation of research, as represented by Kintsch’s model, focussed on the processes and cycles by which mental representations of the text evolve (see Tapiero 2007, 26). The third generation, finally, “emphasizes the interaction between the reading process and the product of the representation”, attempting “to integrate the online and offline aspects of reading brought to the fore by the first two generations” (26). Van den Broek et al. define the comprehension process “as a continuous and dynamic fluctuation of activation patterns” (Tapiero 2007, 26), assuming “four potential sources of activation within each processing cycle” (27). The first source is the text that is currently being processed: “concepts that are explicitly mentioned in the sentence currently being processed become activated and strongly associated to explicit concepts in semantic memory” (27). The second source of activation is “the information that was activated in a preceding reading cycle” (27). The information units that are the most likely to be activated are those that were explicitly mentioned and that were referentially or causally coherent. The third source of activation are “elements of the episodic representation in memory” (27). This means that representations that have been created during prior reading cycles are reinstated. The fourth source is the reader’s background knowledge,

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stored in long-term memory. “Crucial to this model is the idea that the activation levels of elements explicitly mentioned in the text or inferred from it (i.e. from these four sources) fluctuate during the reading process. These fluctuations describe a ‘landscape’ of activations” (27). The reader thus “selectively allocate[s] his or her attention to certain elements” (27–28). This includes passive processes of cohort activation14 and strategic coherence-based retrieval (see 28). The mental representation elaborated thus evolves as the reader processes the text which implies the constant creation of new nodes and connections within the network. [. . .] In the Landscape Model, the four sources of activation combined determine the activation patterns (i.e. the activation vectors) at each point in the reading process. The activation vectors dynamically and gradually construct the episodic representation of the text. Changes in the activation vectors are captured by the mental representation, which, gradually emerging, encodes [. . .] the order of the associations between the concepts of a text and their levels of activation. (Tapiero 2007, 28)

The model highlights the interplay of online processing (cognitive processes during reading) and offline representations (the stored situation model, which is the result of online processing): “Within each processing cycle, the online activation of concepts triggers the reconstruction or reconfiguration of the entire representation” (29). There is “a reciprocal relationship between the episodic memory representation and the activation patterns” (29). To conclude, according to the Landscape Model, [. . .] the sequence of activation patterns observed during the reading process gradually leads to the construction of a complete representation of what has been read. [. . .] The reactivated elements of the episodic representation are part of the process of understanding the current sentence. In this perspective, the interpretation of a new sentence by the reader is partly determined by his or her interpretation of the text as a whole. (Tapiero 2007, 29–30)

The Landscape Model complies with the Pyramid of narrativity in that it underscores the influence that (i) the readers’ individual, interpretative assumptions, (ii) her/his background knowledge and (iii) episodic representations exert during text processing. These factors are visualised, in figure 6b, by the network that emerges within the cognitive-affective system of the reader and by the arrow that interlinks the levels of the narrative schema gestalt/schema and of narrative meaning directly with the reader’s mental network. While it was not possible to visualise the fluctuations of the “landscape of activations”, the assumption of such

14 Cohort activation is the activation of elements that are cognitively associated with the word or concept that is currently being processed.

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fluctuating activation patterns is highly consistent with the dynamic, rhizomatic design of the Pyramid. (iii) Gernsbacher’s ‘Structure Building Framework’. Gernsbacher’s (1990) ‘Structure Building Framework’ “appeals to general purpose cognitive mechanisms to explain how discourse is interpreted and remembered” (Traxler 2012, 199). In this model, representations are introduced at two levels: the micro- and macrolevels. At the microlevel, representations are memory cells, conceptualized quasi-neurologically as individual cells with a base activation level. At the macrolevel, there are abstract structures and substructures that represent episodes, sentences, and clauses. In Gernsbacher’s approach, the mental-structure medium must handle both linguistic and nonlinguistic input, and an intermediate level of representation such as the propositional representation is not adopted. (Tapiero 2007, 46)

Gernsbacher assumes three general cognitive processes: laying a foundation, mapping and shifting. As Traxler summarises, The foundation is based on the information that arrives first, just as laying a foundation is the first thing that happens when you build a house. Two additional general processes, mapping and shifting, are used to continue building the structure once the foundation has been laid. The mapping process connects incoming information to the foundation as long as the incoming information is related to, or coheres with, the preceding information. If the new information is not related to the preceding information, comprehenders undertake the process of shifting to build a new substructure. (Traxler 2012, 199, orig. emphasis)

On a neurological level, this means that When memory nodes become activated by a text, they send out processing signals. The processing signals that the memory nodes send out lead to either enhancement or suppression of other memory nodes. The enhancement mechanism increases the activation of memory nodes that are related to the input and the currently activated set of memory nodes. The suppression mechanism decreases the activation of memory nodes. (Traxler 2012, 200, orig. emphasis)

It is widely acknowledged that shifting – i.e. the mental construction of a new substructure, disconnected with the “foundation” – is cognitively more effortful, slowing down reading times (see Zwaan et al. 1995, 292). Since macrostructural representations are principally characterised via connectedness (i.e. the development of a unified structure), “[s]hifting too often can lead to incoherent mental representations of texts. Failing to suppress activated but irrelevant information can also impair comprehension” (Traxler 2012, 204). Gernsbacher’s Structure Building Framework concretises the assumption, visualised in figure 6b, that narrative dynamics, which aim at creating a narrative gestalt (here called “macrostructural representation”), rely on a dynamic network of connections in the cognitive-affective system of the reader, understood in this

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theory as the neuronal activation of memory nodes. Gernsbacher’s theory also emphasises the importance and autonomy of the stage of narrativity in actualisation by highlighting processes of “shifting”, which can thwart the reader’s ascendance onto the level of resultative narrativity. Moreover, if too great an amount of “irrelevant information” can impair the creation of a macrostructural representation as well, then narratives that provide a very large amount of narrative information, but fail to rank the latter in terms of relevance can be expected to rely heavily on the stage of narrativity actualisation, thus impeding readers from the creation of a coherent narrative gestalt. According to the analysis that I offer in chapters 5 and 6, this is the case both in Kafka’s Schloss and in some of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels. Insofar as “shifting” and the corresponding creation of a new substructure slows down reading times and is more effortful than “mapping”, one can see in this phenomenon a correlate to Shklovsky’s definition of literary art in terms of ostranenie (“defamiliarisation” or “enstrangement”), which “increases the duration and complexity of perception” (Shklovsky 2015, 162). (iv) Zwaan’s, Langston’s and Graesser’s ‘Event-Indexing Model’. The importance of coherence is also underlined by Zwaan, Langston and Graesser who assume that “[t]ext comprehension amounts to constructing a coherent representation of the described world” (Zwaan et al. 1995, 292). But while Gernsbacher’s Structure Building Framework theorises general cognitive processes, Zwaan, Langston and Graesser’s (1995) ‘Even-Indexing Model’ is more specific insofar as it theorises the “construction of situation models in narrative comprehension” (see the title of their [1995] article). When comprehending a simple story, readers construct representations of the characters, events, states, goals, and actions that are described by the story. Readers create, as it were, a microworld of what is conveyed in the story. The linguistic structure of the story can be regarded as a set of processing cues on how to construct such a world. (Zwaan et al. 1995, 292)

The authors propose that events and intentional actions of characters are the focal points of situation models. “[. . .] [A]s each incoming story event or action is comprehended [. . .], the reader monitors and updates the current situation model” (Tapiero 2007, 41) with regard to five indices: time, space, protagonist, causality and intentionality. The authors thus defend a “multicomponent mode[l] of situational coherence” (Zwaan et al. 1995, 292). According to their model, [. . .] any continuation of the current activation of an event node is the default mechanism in text comprehension. A discontinuity on any of the five dimensions causes the reader to deactivate the current node and activate a new node (e.g. a new temporal index) or reactivate an old node. Thus, processing should be more intensive when there are situational discontinuities than when there are no discontinuities [. . .]. Another prediction that

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follows from the event-indexing model is that the strength of the link between two memory nodes coding for story events is a function of the number of shared situational indices. For example, two events that occur during the same time frame and in the same spatial region are more strongly interconnected, all other things being equal, than two events that do not take place during the same time frame in the same spatial region. Thus, the structure of the situation model resulting from the comprehension process is determined by the number of indices story events share. (Zwaan et al. 1995, 292–293)

The authors conduct two experiments, which provide support not only for the existence of the five indices, but also for the hypothesis that these indices are not highly interrelated: each dimension makes an “independent contribution to predicting verb-clustering scores” (1995, 296). The author’s Event-Indexing Model underscores the importance of five “narratemes” (i.e. narrative dimensions, see chapter 2). Three of them can be located in the Pyramid’s textual system (time, space, protagonist), while the other two (causality, intentionality) can be either textual or pragmatic phenomena; this depends on the extent to which the reader has to engage in interpretative activities (on the level of narrativity in actualisation) in order to see causal and intentional links between narrative events. According to Zwaan, Langston and Graesser’s theory, the Pyramid’s “narrative schema”, at which narrative processing aims, can be understood as a mental representation (“microworld”)15 of the narrated world whose essential elements are the enumerated five narratemes. Other important narratemes, especially those connected to narrative discourse (e.g. viewpoint or (un)reliability) and communicative meaning, are left out of considerations. In these connections it is important to note that the author’s theory claims to explain only the processing of “simple” stories (see Zwaan et al. 1995, 292). Like Gernsbacher, the authors assume that “discontinuities” in the narrative complicate the processing and make it more “intensive” – a claim that is, again, very consistent with Shklovsky’s understanding of verbal art according to which “the artistic [object] is ‘artificially’ created in such a way that perception [...] reaches its greatest strength and length” (Shklovsky 2015, 171). The most obvious and most important overlap between the theories summarised above is the crucial role that is attributed to coherence as a guiding principle or goal, which is visualised, in figure 6, by the vertical axis of the Pyramid and its predominantly ascendant direction. Reading comprehension proceeds via attempts to construct a coherent mental representation on the basis of the verbal information given by the text. Secondly, there is a large consensus that the kind of coherence that readers establish in the wake of

15 These assumptions are highly consistent with Herman’s (2013a, b) understanding of narrative in terms of “worldmaking”.

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these attempts may be understood as “conceptual” or “situational continuity” (see Tapiero 2007, 92–93; Schwarz 2001, 22), i.e. as the establishment of an integrated structure (situation model) which connects, on the basis of textual cues, different conceptual-situational contents or activates the neural correlations of the latter (memory nodes) respectively. Consequently, the third, common idea claims that coherence denotes the development of a conceptual (or neural) network structure, be it a net of propositions (Construction-Integration Theory), a network of activation patterns (Landscape Model), a neuroconceptual network that develops via foundations, mappings and shiftings (Structure Building Framework) or a web of conceptually interconnected story events with five situational dimensions (Event-Indexing Model). What additionally has to be noted is the fact that linguists consider coherence not only as the goal and (potential) result of reading comprehension (resultative narrativity) and as the processes that lead to a coherent result (narrativity in actualisation), but also as the enabling condition or expectation that precedes and drives the development of resultative coherence. Drawing on Grice’s principle of cooperation, Bublitz, for instance, considers coherence to be a “default assumption” (1998, 12)16: As long as there is no evidence to the contrary, they [recipients, ESW] proceed from the assumption that what they hear and read can be made coherent, even if this involves making extremely remote and unlikely connections. Speakers/writers likewise rely on the default principle and expect hearers/readers to assume that what they say or write is coherent. (Bublitz 1998, 13)

Coherence has thus several temporal-ontological dimensions: it is there before reading (as a default assumption), during reading (as a dynamic effort of establishing situational continuity or network connectivity) as well as (in the case of a successful establishment of conceptual continuity) after reading (as an offline representation whose static coherence is the result of the dynamic establishment of coherence relations that took place before). One problem, however, is the fact that the word “coherence”, as it is generally used and understood, is mostly equated only with the last of the three temporal dimensions of coherence. What is generally meant, if something is said to be “coherent”, is that the entity designated as coherent possesses a certain kind of continuity, an integrated structure or gestalt. In other words, coherence can be

16 We will consider this problem and especially the consequences of coherence as a default assumption (“interpretative ascent”) in greater detail in section 6.5 in the context of interpretations of Toussaint’s narrative texts, which show a certain resistance against the establishment of typical coherence relations.

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generally understood as the static coherence that results from dynamic coherence. In order to draw on the dynamic component of coherence, terminological precision is paramount in order to prevent misunderstandings. This is why I have proposed to differentiate between these two kinds of coherence terminologically by referring to the dynamic form as coherence in progress and to the static form, which (potentially, i.e. in the case of successful conceptual integration) results from the latter, as resultative coherence (see section 2.3.5 and Wagner 2017). Coherence in progress does therefore not imply any resultative semantics according to which the effortful process (or processual effort) of creating (resultative) coherence would be successfully completed. Instead, it merely denotes the processes that take place in an effort of achieving the goal of resultative coherence. Coherence in progress thus draws on the activities of the (reading) ‘homo ordinans’ (see section 1.3): “People are driven by a strong desire to identify forms, relations, connections which they can maximize in order to turn fragments into whole gestalts, i.e. to ‘see’ coherence in strings of utterances” (Bublitz 1998, 12). The pyramidal differentiation between narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity underscores the difference between (and the autonomy of) these two dimensions of coherence. One has to be careful, however, in claiming that readers make an “effort” in order to achieve coherence, since this claim touches on a vivid debate in linguistics about whether the process that I call coherence in progress is automatic, based on passive resonance (this is the position of Kintsch and Sanford and Garrod, see Tapiero 2007, 62, 82) or strategic, active and effortful (as Gernsbacher and Zwaan and Radvansky claim, see Tapiero 2007, 62, 82). Tapiero, in her attempt to provide an integrated view of the comprehension process, argues in this context that the two possibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but can very well denote different reactions to different inputs, depending “on the nature of the information processed and on the level of processing used by the reader” (2007, 83). Her “conviction is that it is necessary to develop a single integrated theory that makes both passive and strategic processes a necessary part of its structure” (148). The Pyramid of narrativity is able to cover both kinds of processes, although I contend that readers, when they are confronted with narrative inconsistencies and interpretative problems, make a rather conscious effort to establish a coherent conceptual gestalt. This becomes quite obvious in most professional analyses and interpretations of literary texts inasmuch as they elaborate on interpretative problems and propose explicitly a solution to these problems. Such interpretations can thus be considered to be protocols of narrative dynamics in which professional readers consciously and strategically engage in order to create a coherent narrative gestalt and narrative meaning (see my discussion of secondary literature in the second part of this study).

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My position may be supported by Graesser, Singer and Trabasso’s (1994) ‘Constructionist Theory’. The authors present some “distinctive components and assumptions” that discriminate their model from other psycholinguistics theories. One of these assumptions is the ‘principle of search (or effort) after meaning’. “According to this principle, readers attempt to construct a meaning representation [i] that addresses the reader’s goals, [ii] that is coherent at both local17 and global18 levels, and [iii] that explains why actions, events, and states are mentioned in the text” (Graesser et al. 1994, 371). It is important to emphasize that the search-after-meaning principle is an effort, not necessarily an achievement. In most reading contexts, the fruits of these efforts are realized because writers-authors construct messages to be understood. However, there are conditions that prevent the reader from constructing a meaning representation that provides coherence, that explains the explicit text, and that satisfies the reader’s goals. If the reader fails to devote any effort, then these inferences are not drawn. (Graesser et al. 1994, 377)

The “principle of search (or effort) after meaning” is interconnected with another guiding principle according to which reader goals should be met: “When readers comprehend a text, they are motivated by one or more goals. [. . .] [R]eaders are persistent in their attempts to satisfy their goals and therefore will construct inferences that address these goals” (377). Graesser, Singer and Trabasso distinguish between three levels of goal specificity: firstly, they assume a “default” case according to which “the reader’s goal is to construct a meaningful situation model that is compatible with the text” (377); secondly, they postulate a “genre-based” level of goals, i.e. “goals associated with the genre of text” such as “to entertain, to persuade, to inform, and to have an aesthetic-literary impact” (377.); thirdly, they assume an idiosyncratic level of reader goals.19

17 “Local coherence is achieved when conceptual connections relate the content of adjacent text constituents (i.e., a phrase, proposition, or clause) or short sequences of constituents” (Graesser et al. 1994, 378). They associate the term ‘cohesion’ with this kind of coherence. 18 “Global coherence is achieved to the extent that most or all of the constituents can be linked together by one or more overarching themes. [. . .] The establishment of global coherence involves the organization of local chunks of information into higher order chunks. For example, a moral, main point, or theme of a text [. . .] organizes many of the events and episodes in a narrative. A higher order chunk has its tentacles to constituents that span large stretches of a text” (Graesser et al. 1994, 378). 19 Concerning the latter category, they explain: “These goals may lead the reader to construct virtually any type of code (i.e., surface or textbase versus situation model) and virtually any dimension of the situation model (e.g., spatiality, causality, plans, or traits of characters). An adequate account of idiosyncratic goals would need to incorporate a general theory of human

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The assumption of individual reader goals, which direct the readers’ processing and thus lead to the development of individual narrative schemata and meaning, complies well with the Pyramid’s solution to the S/U problem (see section 2.2): it proposes to understand narrativity as a transition from virtual to actual narrativity, the actual being understood “as particular manifestations of virtual possibilities; it [the actual] thus pertains to what is specific and subjective” (section 2.4.1). A second matter of debate within psycholinguistics (besides the active, effortful versus passive, non-strategic nature of coherence in progress) concerns the representational format for situation models (see Zwaan and Singer 2003, 91). While some researchers assume that mental representations have a propositional format,20 other researchers, such as JohnsonLaird and Gernsbacher, claim a more analogical relation between symbols and referents. Analogicity means that the “structure of the model is identical to that of the state of affairs it represents” (Tapiero 2007, 46). Gernsbacher (1990), for instance, “assumes that comprehenders mentally represent physical situations expressed by language, and develop relatively iconic representations of the physical situations conveyed by texts” (Tapiero 2007, 46–47). Other researchers, such as Barsalou and Glenberg, go further in that direction by assuming “that cognition is grounded in perception and action. In this theoretical framework, cognition relies on the use of perceptual and motor representations, rather than on abstract, amodal, arbitrary representations such as the propositional format” (Tapiero 2007, 48). In other words, people use their own perceptual, emotional and motor experiences, stored in memory, in order to represent text information. This assumption may be related to the phenomenon of “immersion” (and to ‘embodied cognition’21 approaches): [. . .] situation models are viewed as experiential (perception and action) simulations of the described situation [. . .] in which affordances derived from sensory-motor simulations are essential for semantic processing. Zwaan [. . .] also stresses the role in defining situation models of vicarious experiences in narrative comprehension, and recent empirical evidence converges in suggesting that the comprehender can be viewed as an immersed experiencer: Readers experience information as if they were participating in the corresponding activity [. . .] (Tapiero 2007, 40)

motivation, which is quite outside the boundaries of our constructionist theory” (Graesser et al. 1994, 377). 20 “According to van Dijk and Kintsch [. . .], information is represented as propositional networks at the semantic and situational levels” (Tapiero 2007, 46). 21 Sadoski describes the movement of embodied cognition via its central claim according to which “all cognitive representations and processes are based in the body’s physical interaction with the world” (Sadoski 2009, 188).

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Consequently, “the internal structure of situation models may be a reflection of how individuals perceive and relate entities in the world” (Tapiero 2007, 53). Concerning the alternative between propositional and more analogical (perceptual, sensory-motor) representational formats, Tapiero finally asserts that the cognitive operations carried out by readers are “general enough to subsume several representational formats” (113). But what is the relationship between the verbal-propositional and nonverbal, more embodied formats? This question has been addressed by a cognitive approach called ‘Dual Coding Theory’.

3.1.3 Coherence in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science A. Sadoski and Paivio’s ‘Dual Coding Theory’. Sadoski and Paivio’s ‘Dual Coding Theory’ (DCT) “is a theory of general cognition that addresses reading in all its psychological aspects” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 913). It shares basic assumptions with other theories of reading, such as schema theory or Kintsch’s approach. For instance, they all claim an interplay of bottom-up and top-down processes and acknowledge the importance of prior knowledge structures in reading (see 904). The main difference between DCT and other theories, however, consists of Sadoski and Paivio’s rejection of the assumption “that most knowledge in memory is abstract and amodal, existing in a state that has no objective reality and is associated with no sensory modality” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 904). Abstract, amodal approaches tend to be single-code theories, such as Kintsch’s ‘Construction-Integration Model’, which posits propositions (and thus the linguistic code) as the central processing unit (see 904). Sadoski and Paivio, on the contrary, assume that both language and mental imagery are important in the process of comprehension and constructing meaning in reading (Sadoski and Paivio 1994, 582). According to the authors, they constitute two “codes” or “systems”: A basic premise of DCT is that all mental representations retain some of the concrete qualities of the external experiences from which they derive. These experiences can be linguistic or nonlinguistic. Their differing characteristics develop into two separate mental systems or codes: one specialized for representing and processing language (the verbal code) and one for processing nonlinguistic objects and events (the nonverbal code). The latter is frequently referred to as the imagery system or code because its functions include the generation, analysis, and transformation of mental images. [. . .] Together, the two codes account for knowledge of language and knowledge of the world. The two mental codes and our five senses are orthogonal in DCT. This means that the two codes each have subsets of mental representations that are qualitatively different because of the different sensory experiences from which they originated. Because sensory

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systems are linked to motor response systems in perception (e.g., eye movements, listening attitudes, active touch) these subsets have sensorimotor qualities. (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887)

The assumption of two cognitive systems (codes) and five sensorimotor qualities provides the DCT model with a representational grid, constituted by two columns (the verbal and nonverbal codes) and five rows (“modalities”), which refer to the five senses by which linguistic and nonlinguistic data are perceived (1. visual, 2. auditory, 3. haptic, 4. gustatory and 5. olfactory modality of representation). According to the authors, this grid may be extended by emotional feelings and reactions as a further, nonverbal modality (see Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887; 1994, 590) that “correlates” with imagery (see Sadoski and Paivio 1994, 594). This claim is consistent with the Pyramid’s assumption that the textual system does not only interact with the reader’s verbal and encyclopaedic knowledge, but with the entire “cognitive-affective system of the reader” – a formula that shall cover the whole range of both abstract and embodied mental content. On the side of the verbal code, Sadoski and Paivio range visual representations of linguistic forms (letters, words and sentences), auditory representations of “speech units we have heard such as phonemes and their combination” as well as haptic representations of “linguistic motor acts (e.g. pronouncing /b/ or writing the letter b [. . .])” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887).22 The nonverbal code, on the contrary, provides us with representations of nonlinguistic entities in all five modalities: visual representations of everyday objects or scenarios, auditory representations of environmental sounds (e.g. squealing tyres), haptic representations of how objects, textures or movements feel, gustatory representations of tastes (taste memories) and olfactory representations of smells (smell memories) (as well as, additionally, nonverbal representations of emotions). DCT complies with the rhizomatic shape of the Pyramid and with its principle of zoomability in that it considers the interaction of (sub-)systems and the establishment of connections as the central operating device of cognition: “The overall system can be imagined as a set of modality- and code-specific subsystems that are laced with interconnections. These subsystems are independent23

22 However, two combinatory categories remain empty in the verbal code, namely the verbalgustatory and the verbal-olfactory categories, since language cannot be represented by smell and taste. As to emotional feelings and reactions, the authors assert that they “are nonverbal by definition, although we have many names for emotional states” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887). 23 Empirical evidence from patients with various difficulties concerning language processing (such as alexia or anomia) as well as the phenomenon of modality-specific interference support the authors’ hypothesis that the representational subsystems are modular in nature. Alexia denotes an inability to read. However, the same word that cannot be understood in its written form

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and appear to be specialized in certain, sometimes multiple, areas of the brain” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887). Since cognitive theories “usually specify basic units or ‘building blocks’ of cognition”, the authors propose two basic units for the two codes: logogens, on the one hand, are the basic units of the verbal system, i.e. “anything learned as a unit of language in some sense modality” (2013, 889); imagens, on the other, are the basic units of the nonverbal system, which are equally modality-specific and vary, as too do logogens, in size. “Logogens and imagens are theoretical constructs for the basic elements in each system and are assumed to have corresponding neurological structures” (Sadoski and Paivio 1994, 584). According to DCT, imagens and logogens are qualitatively very different: “Imagens are represented and organized in a [. . .] continuous, integrated way and cannot as easily be separated into discrete elements comparable to phonemes, letters, or words” (2013, 890). While logogens and their verbal hierarchy “are heavily sequentially constrained”, imagens and their nonverbal hierarchy “are more holistic and simultaneous. This combination provides great flexibility to cognition” (2013, 890).24 But if there are two codes, divided into modality-specific modules, what is the relationship between these different representational formats? In other words, how does dual-coded cognition in general and reading in particular function according to DCT? The authors distinguish three processing operations: (i) representational, (ii) associative and (iii) referential processing. Firstly, on the level of representational processing, logogens or imagens are activated by stimuli (e.g., by textual signs). “This level is analogous to simply recognizing something as familiar and

can be understood by the same patients when it is vocalised. This indicates that the verbal code functions according to modality-specific representations (in this case, visual versus auditory modality) (see Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 887–888). Anomia designates the impaired capacity to name objects that, nonetheless, are recognised by the patient. This indicates a general independence between nonverbal and verbal codes, since an object may be recognised nonverbally, but what lacks is a verbal equivalent in the patient’s cognition (see Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 888). “Modality-specific interference” designates the “limited ability to do two things in the same modality at once” (see Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 888). For example, one can simultaneously listen to a conversation (verbal code, auditory modality) and to music (nonverbal code, auditory modality), but not simultaneously to two conversations (see Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 888). 24 A specificity of imagens consists in their tendency “to be perceived in nested sets. That is, mental images are often embedded in larger mental images” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 889) as well as in “a larger mental structure that reflects the multisensory nature of physical reality” (889). The memory of a baseball game, for instance, is a quite complex representational entity where small-scale images (such as that of a baseball bat) are embedded in larger images (e.g. the crowded stadium) and combined with nonvisual-nonverbal representations (e.g. the noise in the stadium, the smell of the French fries of your seatmate or the emotional state associated with the experience).

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does not necessarily imply meaningful comprehension” (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 891). For instance, a reader may read and recognise the word ‘baseball’ (“activation of a visual logogen for a printed word”, 891), which does not imply that s/he is able to associate an image or meaning to it. Secondly, the level of associative processing “involves spreading activation within a code that is typically associated with meaningful comprehension” (2013, 891). The word baseball, for instance, which has been processed visually on the level of representational processing, may spread within the verbal code to the auditory-motor modality, permitting the reader to pronounce the word. Associative processing also implies the activation of further logogens by previously activated logogens (cohort activation). Reading the word ‘dog’ may, for instance, lead to the activation of other words such as ‘to bark’ or ‘leash’. “Meaning is both constrained and elaborated by the set of verbal associates activated” (2013, 891). Referential processing, finally, refers to “spreading activation between the codes”, that is, the activation of nonverbal representations by verbal stimuli and vice versa. “In reading, this means that activated logogens in turn activate imagens in the same way they activate other logogens” (2013, 892). This kind of processing is associated with meaningful comprehension. For instance, if one recognises the word ‘umbrella’, associates it with the function of protecting one from the rain and visualises an umbrella and/or experiences associates with it, one understands what is meant by the textual sign “umbrella”. The authors also take individual dispositions and contextual parameters into account, claiming that “[t]he image evoked depends on the cultural experiences of individual readers and the situation described in the text” (Sadoski and Paivio 1994, 588). The specificity of Sadoski and Paivio’s approach consists in offering a differentiated account of the interplay between imagery and verbal processing. But there is also an important overlap between DCT and the other theories that we considered so far: they agree in postulating an interdependence between coherence, connectivity, “network” structures, the dynamic25 creation of a situation model, comprehension and meaning: Associative connections and referential connections between the verbal associates and the nonverbal associates form an internally consistent network that is the basis of meaning, comprehension, and the mental model. Meaning in this instance consists of this coherent network of activated verbal and nonverbal representations. The richer the elaboration of activated mental representations and their defining interconnections, the

25 The dynamic aspect becomes especially obvious in Sadoski and Paivio’s considerations on how the interplay of verbal and nonverbal units constrains the development of a coherent meaning during reading. Especially “imagery helps constrain and specify the set of subsequent probable wordings by nonverbal means, and also expands the episode inferentially. It becomes an invaluable partner in the reduction of uncertainty and the construction and shaping of meaning” (Sadoski and Paivio 1994, 587).

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more ‘meaningful’ our response. Comprehension is the relative equilibrium in the network. The set of verbal associations and the set of nonverbal associations correspond and restrict each other sufficiently well to produce closure rather than a random-search activation without coherence. The term mental model, as used here, applies to the total verbal-nonverbal correspondence aggregate. The mental model is the restricted set of activated representations and the associative and referential connections between them. (Sadoski and Paivio 2013, 895–896, orig. emphasis)

The close connection between the development of a mental model (in the form of a coherent network) and the phenomena of meaning and comprehension, claimed by DCT, complies well with the structure of the Pyramid according to which narrative meaning is the phenomenal summit and last stage of the creation of narrativity, (the creation of) a coherent narrative schema being its prerequisite. B. Fauconnier and Turner’s ‘Blending Theory’. The theory of ‘blending’ or of ‘conceptual integration’, developed in the field of cognitive linguistics by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, is a general cognitive theory that accounts for the human capacity to creatively (re-)combine conceptual entities. One of its theoretical predecessors in this field is the theory of metaphor. The main assumption of this theory is that ‘cognitive metaphors’ are tools of thinking, which consist essentially in “understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 5, original emphasis deleted). Lakoff and Johnson assume, for instance, that people deal with abstract concepts (like TIME) by understanding it in terms of a more concrete concept (like MONEY). The cognitive outcome of this metaphorical process are cognitive metaphors (like TIME IS MONEY), which can be detected by the analysis of language use (cf. sentences like “You’re wasting my time”). While this theory distinguishes between conceptual source and target domains, the former being mapped on the latter (MONEY → TIME), blending theory does not agree with this “mapping scheme” as a general rule (see Fauconnier 2009, 147). According to blending theory, asymmetrical source-target mappings, typical for metaphors, constitute only one out of four subtypes of blending (namely “single-scope networks”, see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 126–131). These four subtypes (see below) are not “four separate and unrelated species [. . .] but are prominent points that stand out on a continuous landscape” (139). Blending theory thus offers “a way to see unity behind the diversity of particular manifestations of meaning constructions” (137). This unity is given by the more general mechanism that underlies metaphorical thought and other ways of thinking, namely the mechanism of blending (i.e. conceptual integration). It is the theory’s ambitious aspiration for universality (i.e., its pretension to explain all kinds of meaning constructions) that renders it highly pertinent in the context of textual and narrative coherence. The basic unity of this theory are mental spaces, that is, “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding

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and action” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 40). “They contain elements and are structured by frames and cognitive models. Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge, such as the frame for walking along a path, and to long-term specific knowledge, such as memory of the time when you climbed Mount Rainier in 2001” (Fauconnier 2007, 351). “Mental spaces are constructed, modified, interconnected and integrated as thought and discourse unfolds” (351). Thus, on the one hand, the theory integrates the aspects of mental organisation and representation of knowledge, based on the interaction of working and long-term memory; on the other hand, it models the construction of meaning as an act of understanding in specific contexts and situations (see Hartner 2012, 128). Fauconnier and Turner also offer a “neural interpretation of these cognitive processes”, according to which “mental spaces are sets of activated neuronal assemblies, and the lines between elements correspond to coactivation-bindings of a certain kind” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 40). Fauconnier and Turner’s theory relies primarily on a “network model” of conceptual integration. At its lowest level of complexity, the conceptual integration network is constituted by four mental spaces. First, there are two mental “input spaces”, which “can be activated in a person’s mind by verbal as well as nonverbal prompts” (Dancygier 2012b, 32); they trigger the process of conceptual integration. The two input spaces engage in a process of cognitive interaction, conceptualised as a “cross-space mapping” by which counterparts in the two input spaces become interconnected. This process generates two other spaces: the Generic Space and the Blended Space (also called “the blend”). The Generic Space, contains “what the inputs have in common” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 41); it thus displays structural similarities between the two input spaces. The Blended Space, for its part, is the emergent, creative product of the crossspace mapping, which contains elements of the two input spaces (see Figure 7). Some structural elements from the two different input spaces were selected and mapped onto the blended space; some fuse in the blend, others were not projected to the blend at all. The result is a new mental space, that is, a new conceptual construct with emergent structure and meaning.26 What is central to this network model is its dynamic nature as well as its complexity. Concerning dynamics, all operations in a conceptual integration network run simultaneously. Accordingly, all the mental spaces remain intact during the whole

26 “Emergent structure” means that the blend contains structure (and thus creates meaning) that is not copied from the inputs. Three processes are responsible for the emergent structure of the blend: “composition”, “completion” and “elaboration”. Composition of elements from the inputs makes relations available in the blend that do not exist in the separate inputs. Completion brings additional structure to the blend, for instance by means of recruiting

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Generic Space

Input I1

Input I2

Blend Figure 7: Blending: The Network Model (Basic Diagram from Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 46).

process of meaning production, interacting with each other ceaselessly. This interaction also implies processes of “backward projection”, which map elements from the blended space back onto the input spaces. The dynamics also have, so to speak, a certain direction, inasmuch as “[t]he integration network is trying to achieve equilibrium. In a manner of speaking, there is a place where the network is ‘happy’. [. . .] The network will achieve equilibrium if structure comes up in the blend [. . .] [W]hat counts as an equilibrium for the network will depend on its purpose, but also on various internal constraints on its dynamics” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 44–45). This equilibrium is a “moment of tangible, global understanding”, occurring “when a network has been elaborated in such a way that it contains a solution that is delivered to consciousness” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 57).27 Concerning complexity, it is important to note that a blend – as the creative outcome of the process of meaning production – may itself engage again in a variety of further blending processes (recursion). It thereby creates a growing,

cognitive frames or schemata into the blended space. Elaboration means running the blend (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 42–44). It refers to the dynamics of the cognitive processes that create the network with its four mental spaces. If the mental spaces contain scripts, i.e., schemata with a temporal dimension (succession of events, course of action, etc.), running the blend also means conceptualising and blending temporal-spatial developments. 27 As a kind of “aha!” effect, “the effects of the unconscious imaginative work are apprehended in consciousness, but not the operations that produce it” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 57).

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increasingly complex web of connections and blending processes.28 According to the authors, this kind of recursion happens routinely in the development of science and mathematics.29 Fauconnier and Turner identify four types of blending: simplex networks,30 mirror networks,31 single-scope networks32 and double-scope networks (see

28 Generally, the complexity of the network and its many processes contrast, however, with what we experience consciously. Many daily activities, from perception to the understanding of simple sentences, rely on complex blending processes, but are experienced as effortless. 29 They give the example of the notion of “wave”: “If we start with a wave such as we see at the seashore, and then consider sound, and recognize that sound, though a different phenomenon, still has longitudinal motion in a medium, we can make a new blended category wave that now includes various kinds of ‘longitudinal’ waves. That new category wave can be an input to a further blending network, whose other input has electromagnetic phenomena. The blended space in the new network now has a category wave that includes ‘electromagnetic’ waves” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 335). 30 In simplex networks, the cross-space mapping between the input spaces is a frame-to-values connection. Understanding of the sentence “Paul is the father of Sally”, for instance, can be analysed as relying on the blending of two input spaces: on the one hand, a family space, which includes roles (father, mother, child, etc.), on the other hand, a space that contains (concepts of) two human beings: Paul and Sally. When the role ‘father’ is mapped onto the value ‘Paul’, and when the role ‘daughter’ is mapped onto the value ‘Sally’, the result of the processing of the sentence “Paul is the father of Sally” is a blend in which Paul is mapped onto the role father of Sally. Simplex Networks are the prototype of semantic composition, as it expressed by Fregean logic: F (a,b) (with F=father, a=Paul, b=Sally) (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 120). 31 In mirror networks, all spaces (inputs, generic and blend) mirror each other in the sense that they all have the same organising frame. As an example, Fauconnier and Turner cite the Regatta case: “The clipper ship Northern Light sailed in 1853 from San Francisco to Boston on 76 days, 8 hours. That time was still the fastest in record in 1993, when a modern catamaran, Great American II, set out on the same course. A few days before the catamaran reached Boston, observers were able to say: ‘At this point, Great American II is 4.5 days ahead of Northern Light.’ This expression frames the two boats as sailing on the same course during the same time period in 1993. It blends the event of 1853 and the event of 1993 into a single event” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 63). The two input frames (the sailing of Northern Light in 1853 and the sailing of Great American II in 1993) share the same organising frame ‘boat sailing on an ocean course’. The blend has emergent meaning, since the blending processes create a more elaborate frame, ‘sailboats racing along an ocean course’. The frame ‘race’ is automatically added to the blend by ‘pattern completion’. (Race does not inhere in any of the input spaces, since in each input space, there is only a single boat sailing along an ocean course.) Since the organising frame ‘boat sailing on an ocean course’ is entailed by the more elaborate structure of the blend, it organises all spaces of the conceptual integration network. 32 In single-scope networks, there are two input spaces with different organising frames, and only one of these organising frames is projected to organise the blend. The defining property of single-scope networks “is that the organizing frame of the blend is an extension of the organizing frame of one of the inputs but not the other” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 126). It is thus a case

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Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 120–135). Of special importance is the double-scope network, which [. . .] has inputs with different (and often clashing) organizing frames as well as an organizing frame for the blend that includes parts of each of those frames and has emergent structure of its own. In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 131)

An example is the sentence “You are digging your own grave”. This sentence “typically serves as a warning that (1) you are doing bad things that will cause you to have a very bad experience, and (2) you are unaware of this causal relation” (2002, 131). There are two input spaces: DIGGING THE GRAVE and UNWITTING FAILURE. In this blend, “[f]ailing is projected to being dead and buried; bad moves that precede and cause failure are digging one’s own grave” (132). Concerning the causal, intentional and internal event structure, the topologies of the two input spaces clash: digging a grave does not cause somebody to die (no causality in DIGGING THE GRAVE), but foolish actions cause failure (causality in UNWITTING FAILURE); someone who digs a grave is aware of what s/he is doing and has the intention of digging a grave (intentionality in DIGGING THE GRAVE), but someone who performs foolish actions is not aware of the fact that s/he is doing something foolish (no intentionality in UNWITTING FAILURE); typically, death precedes the digging of a grave (temporality in DIGGING THE GRAVE), but failure does not precede foolish actions; instead, it results from them (temporality in UNWITTING FAILURE). The blended space thus inherits concrete structure from DIGGING THE GRAVE (structure of graves, digging and burial), but causal, intentional and internal event structure from UNWITTING FAILURE (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 132–133). The result is an emergent conceptual structure according to which “[t]he existence of a satisfactory grave causes death and is a

of asymmetric projection, as it is characteristic for source-target metaphors (as analysed by Lakoff and Johnson). “A principal job of such networks is to project diffuse structure from the focus input into the already-compressed inner-space relations that have been projected to the blend from the framing input” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 129). For example, the sentence “He digested the book” blends conceptual counterparts in two input spaces (eating and reading). It is the organising frame of ‘eating’ that structures the blend inasmuch as the successive stages that provide ‘eating’ with conceptual structure and unity conceptually structure the stages of ‘reading’ in the blend (to pick up food/to take up the book; to chew/to read; to swallow/to parse individual sentences; digestion/reflexion; nutrients uptake/integration of ideas) (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 131).

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necessary precondition for it [. . .]. In the blend [. . .], digging one’s own grave is a serious mistake that makes dying more likely” (133).33 The connections between elements of spaces (such as Time, Space, CauseEffect, Change, Identity, Part-Whole etc., see Fauconnier and Turner, Ch. 6) are called “vital relations”. A very common mechanism of blending is the compression of vital relations. Specific vital relations between two elements of the two input spaces (“outer-space relations”) become often compressed into another vital relation between the two elements in the blend (“inner-space relation”, see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 92–101). Two examples: if we point to a picture of a face and say “That’s Mary”, we have created a blend where the outer-space relation Part-Whole, which exists between Mary’s face on the picture (input 1) and the individual Mary (input 2), is compressed into Uniqueness in the blend (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 97). Or take the sentence “My tax bill gets bigger every year”. This sentence represents a blend “where there is a single thing whose size changes. We automatically decompress Change in the blend into outer-space Disanalogy between quite distinct tax bills” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 94). Accordingly, outer-space Disanalogy is compressed into inner-space Change.34 In concluding, two things have to be added. Firstly, besides the constitutive principles that underlie the network model (partial cross-space mapping, selective projection to the blend, development of emergent structure in the blend, etc.), the authors identify and explain a large number of additional governing principles, which characterise strategies for optimising emergent structure.35 Secondly, Fauconnier and Turner claim that double-scope blending is a specifically human capacity that evolved 50,000 years ago through neurological 33 The concreteness given to the blend by digging the grave intensifies the idea of foolishness and of misperception of proper behaviour inasmuch as one must be highly foolish to be unaware of the fact that one is digging one’s own grave. 34 For the sake of brevity, I have quoted only a few simple and short examples. Fauconnier and Turner analyse more complex examples, i.e. multiple scope integration networks or megablends (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Ch. 14 and 15) as well as examples from our material culture (wristwatches, gauges, money or cathedrals) that are equally based upon powerful integration networks and use objects as material anchors (see also Ch. 10). 35 Several of these “optimality principles” concern the compression of vital relations (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 312–325), others concern topology (see 327), pattern completion (see 328), integration (see 328), the maximisation and intensification of vital relations (see 330), the maintenance of the web (see 331), processes of conceptual unpacking (see 332) and the relevance of blended elements (see 333). There is, however, an “overarching goal” that is served by all the constitutive and governing principles of conceptual integration: “Achieve Human Scale”. All principles aim at making the blend “more human-friendly”, i.e. “more intelligible, vivid, memorable, and useful to us as human beings” (322), for instance by compressing what is diffuse or by strengthening vital relations.

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evolution. “[. . .] [O]nce double-scope blending was achieved, culture as we know it emerged. Cultures could create specific double-scope integration networks that then quickly showed up in languages, number systems, rituals and sacraments, art forms, representation systems, technologies” (389). Language is thus only one out of many cultural “surface manifestation[s]” (177) of double-scope integration. We live in (and are born into) a world “richly structured by complex, entrenched, cultural conceptual blends” (390), which must be mastered if one wants to function in society. Consequently, the cognitive phenomenon of blending “is not something we do in addition to living in the world; it is our means of living in the world.” (390). I would like to highlight three aspects in which blending theory is consistent with the rhizomatic Pyramid of narrativity. Firstly, Fauconnier and Turner’s network model provides a blueprint for the analysis of the conceptual processes (narrativity in actualisation) that may lead to the creation of a new, conceptually integrated gestalt (resultative narrativity). Secondly, their theory provides an explanation of the process of emergence, which has been presented, in figure 6b, as a result of complex narrative network dynamics, but which had not yet been substantiated by me. Thirdly, Fauconnier and Turner highlight the recursive dimensions of blending (i.e., the participation of blends in further processes of conceptual integration); this idea is consistent with Pyramid’s “recursive loops” (see section 2.4.4). Blending theory is also highly compatible with current psycholinguistic theories. The creation of a situation model, for instance, can be understood as a dynamic of conceptual integration. According to Tapiero, readers [. . .] achieve a greater or lesser degree of stability on the ‘state’ of their representation, that is, a coherent situation model. Situation models would, in this case, be conceived of not as fixed structures but as ‘mental representation spaces’ that would be flexible enough to allow for the dynamic interplay between the various constraints, becoming gradually modified and enriched through their interactions throughout the processing of the text. [. . .] If situation models are a kind of flexible mental space, comprehension could be defined as the gradual emergence of meaning, within such a space that would fluctuate constantly throughout the reading process. (Tapiero 2007, 198)

Moreover, there is a number of similarities between blending theory and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizome whose epistemology underlies the Pyramid of narrativity.36 The two approaches use a “spatial” terminology: Fauconnier and Turner claim the 36 These similarities can be summarised by the following claims: 1. Cognition (and the linguistic forms and meanings produced by it) relies on processes by which disparate elements are connected. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “Thought is not arborescent” (1988, 15).

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existence of “mental spaces”, which have a certain “topology” and Deleuze and Guattari work with spatial concepts such as “territory” or “the outside” versus “interiority” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9).37 Both Deleuze and Guattari and Fauconnier and Turner underscore the importance of the relations between elements of spaces. For Deleuze and Parnet, “there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight, etc.” (2007, 10). Rhizomatic dynamics that take place in this geography are an “a-parallel evolution”, which happens “between ideas, each one being deterritorialized in the other, following a line or lines which are neither in one nor the other” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 18). That Deleuze thinks in terms of “lines” is consistent with Fauconnier and Turner’s visualisation of “vital relations” and “cross-space connections” by lines. Deleuze and Parnet’s idea of “lines which are neither in one nor the other” idea complies not only with the Fauconnier and Turner concept of “outer-space relations”, but also with the idea of emergent “vital relations” in the blend. Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that there are “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification” (1988, 3) is consistent with the functioning of the conceptual integration network, inasmuch as the interplay of the input spaces produces a whole conceptual network, including a new mental space (or “territory”); in this connection, elements, structures and meanings become detached from their original mental spaces (“deterritorialised”) and integrated (“moved”) into a new mental space (“reterritorialisation”), through cross-space “mappings” and selective projections (“lines of flight”). All in all, Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructuralist notion of the rhizome thus seems to be quite consistent, at least on an epistemological level, with the findings of contemporary cognitive-linguistic science.

2.

This interconnectivity transforms the disparate elements into a network-like assemblage with emergent meaning that is essentially constituted by a dynamic multiplicity. 3. Meaning can be explained in terms of the structures of the assemblage, including “betweenness”. 4. The assemblage or multiplicity is simultaneously dynamic and static, multiple and unified. 5. Cognition aspires after (and does create) fixed conceptual structures, but lives by conceptual flux, i.e., by dynamic renewals according to which fixed conceptual structures function as constitutive elements for new conceptual recombinations and structures (‘recursion’). 37 The spatial aspect is also well highlighted by the rhizomatic notion of a “map” (instead of a “tracing”) that is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions” and “susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 12). That the two theories use spatial terminology is not surprising, inasmuch as the cultural world of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, with its spatio-temporal discontinuity, is characterised by a new spatial semantics, different from Euclidean spatiality, which is mirrored by spatial metaphors in a variety of cultural theories (see Koschorke 2012, 111–115; see also Gibson 1996, 8–22, especially 13).

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Blending theory has been adopted with much enthusiasm in literary and narrative theory.38 While I cannot give an exhaustive overview of the various uses of blending theory in literary and narrative theory here, I would like to give at least a few examples in order to highlight the pertinence of blending theory for the question of coherence. In her article “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis”, Freeman (2002) argues that “cognitive analysis can provide means whereby literary interpretations might be described and categorized with respect to how cultural knowledge may influence readings” (480). Insofar as blending theory works with mental spaces, frames and schemata, which differ from individual to individual due to different cultural, social and intellectual backgrounds, the use of this theory allows for the analysis of different or even clashing interpretations as different readerly conceptual integrations. Freeman provides such a blending-theoretical analysis of conflicting interpretations of a poem by Emily Dickinson, which serve as a “database for empirical research on how metaphorical meanings are mapped and what motivates them” (2002, 480). Freeman’s considerations underscore the solution that blending theory offers in view of what I have called the S/U problem (see section 2.2). Inasmuch as the design of the Pyramid of narrativity allows for the analysis of different, individual narrativities as well, the Pyramid shares with blending theory the solution provided by the assumption of individuated networks. Crisp (2008) uses blending theory in order to provide a neat distinction between ‘allegory’ and ‘extended metaphor’.39 “We have allegory if, and only if, 38 What is responsible for this positive echo is probably the ‘cognitive turn’ in the humanities and in literary theory, which has led to the emergence of different kinds of cognitive approaches, for example ‘Cognitive Poetics’ (as opposed to cognitive linguistics) and ‘Cognitive Stylistics’. For an overview, including bibliographical references, see Fludernik (2010, 1–6). For an overview on the cognitive turn in narratology, see e.g. Ibsch (1990). 39 Crisp’s approach is more sceptical with regard to the explanatory scope of blending theory than Freeman’s. According to Crisp, blending “is not by itself enough, cannot by itself account for the phenomenon of allegory in particular or for metaphor in general”, although he admits that blending theory “is still to be seen as playing a crucial role in at least some metaphor, as well as in a number of significant non-metaphorical phenomena” (Crisp 2008, 304). He contests the validity of Fauconnier and Turner’s analysis of simplex networks (‘red pencil’, ‘Paul’s daughter’), see (Crisp 2008, 295), arguing that “[t]he only true blends are figurative blends” (295): “What is special about blending is not the fusion of concepts as such but rather the blended space’s highly indirect relation to reality” (295). He thus proposes a reconceptualisation of blending, according to which “[t]here is blending when, and only when, a conceptual integration network contains a mental space in which concepts are fused, or otherwise combined and/or related, and when this space as a result of this fusion cannot function directly as a reality space” (295–296).

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there is direct reference to entities in a possible situation from which an underlying mapping then proceeds, the target never being referred to directly. We have extended metaphor if, and only if, a metaphorical blended space is used to characterize a target that is directly referred to” (2008, 294). He illustrates his theoretical propositions with an analysis of Blake’s poem “The Poison Tree” where, as he argues convincingly, ‘allegory’ emerges from an ‘extended metaphorical’ blend. Turner himself applied blending theory to the study of narratives by introducing the notion of “double-scope stories”: “In a double-scope story network, there are input stories with different (and often clashing) organizing frames that are blended into a third story whose organizing frame includes parts of each of the input organizing frames. The story has emergent structure of its own” (2003, 128). As examples, he draws on the story of Jesus,40 but also on the confession scene of Racine’s Phèdre, where Phaedra recounts a story that may be analysed as a ‘blend’.41 Alonso (2003) uses blending theory in order to analyse how the coherence of narrative discourse – more precisely: the coherence of William Boyd’s “My girl in skin-tight jeans” – is created. According to his analysis, the coherence of this specific homodiegetic narration results from the reader’s reconstruction of the narrator’s cognition as a blend of reality and non-reality. He argues that the application of blending theory – together with “more traditionally considered techniques of coherence achievement” – can “provide a rational and thorough interpretation of apparently incoherent data” (Alonso 2003, 21). The analysis of coherence also constitutes the focus of Dancygier’s (2012b) narratological study The language of stories according to which narrative meaning is constructed through processes of blending and cross-space mapping between narrative spaces (see section 2.3.5). Fludernik (2010) uses blending theory in order to give a more precise account of narrative processes of naturalisation, i.e. of the readerly “strategy of converting non-naturally-occurring storytelling scenarios into familiarized models of narration” (Fludernik 2010, 1) (which concerns level three and four of her model, see Fludernik 1996, 43–52, 372–373). She

40 “In the blend, we integrate features of Jesus [‘he is unsinning’] with features of the human beings [‘who are sinful’], producing emergent structure according to which the human beings no longer must bear the consequences of their sins” (Turner 2003, 129). 41 He highlights, however, that double-scope stories are not restricted to the narrative genre. As Turner has already pointed out in The Literary Mind, “Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories” (Turner 1998, V). Accordingly, also ‘double-scope stories’ “are not restricted to a particular human rank, a class of conceptual domains, or a kind of cultural practice. On the contrary, they are everywhere, the inescapable hallmark of all cognitively modern human beings” (Turner 2003, 132).

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argues that “non-natural storytelling frames arise from the blending of previously familiar natural or naturalized storytelling scenarios” (Fludernik 2010, 15). An autodiegetic narrator telling its own death, for instance, can be analysed as a blend resulting from selective projections and mappings from the inputs of the omniscient narration of a character’s death (input 1) and the character’s experience of dying (input 2) (see Fludernik 2010, 17–18). Hartner (2012) uses blending theory in order to reconceptualise, as the title states, “perspectival interaction in the novel” (his approach will be presented and discussed in greater detail in section 4.3.3). Schneider and Hartner (2012) have edited a narratological volume whose essays explore connections between blending theory and the study of narrative. Besides articles that use blending theory primarily in order to produce “fresh readings of texts and films” (Schneider 2012, 20), other articles work towards a blending-theoretical conceptualisation of central narratological categories. Feyersinger, for instance, analyses metalepsis as a hyperblend, which integrates to different degrees two inconsistent blends created by the readers while they read a book or watch a film.42 Sinding provides a generic analysis of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, arguing that the novel is a genre blend resulting from a conceptual network that integrates the genres of chivalric romance and picaresque novel. He adopts thus a large-scale application of blending theory, arguing that “input spaces are whole genres; and the blend is a whole narrative, which also inaugurates the new genre of the novel” (2012, 163). Oakley and Tobin present a theory about the creation of suspense in film and therefore combine blending theory with the concept of joint attention.43 (I myself

42 More precisely, he analyses two forms of metalepsis exemplarily: firstly, the metalepsis of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Continuidad de los parques/Continuity of Parks”, which completely conflates a hypo- (or meta-)diegetic and an intradeigetic world into one unique world; secondly, the metalepsis of Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which the two worlds are not conflated, but undergo partial transgressions (due to a physical barrier, which is present, but impermeable in one of the two worlds, although it becomes permeable in the hyperblend). 43 The tripartite model of joint attention plays a role inasmuch as spectators of a film (part 1) concentrate their attention on happenings and objects (part 2) presented in the film, and it is the camera (part 3) that guides their (and produces a ‘joint’) attention. It is primarily the conceptual integration of the elements of two spaces that produces suspense, namely elements from the ‘Presentation space’ (the “moment-by-moment interaction between the camera’s gaze and the viewer with respect to the conventional means of presenting the dramatic action on the screen”, Oakley and Tobin 2012, 66) and the ‘Reference space’ (“the staged business or story world being depicted on the screen”, Oakley and Tobin 2012, 66). In order to model the online creation of suspense, the authors postulate a kind of feedback-loop (see their figures 4, 10 and 14) according to which the suspense-creating blend prompts the spectator to draw pragmatic inferences, and thus influences his “conditions of attending” (‘ontological ground’, see 66, 67).

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will refer to blending theory in my analysis of the narrative dynamics of both Laclos44 and Toussaint.)45 As Schneider explains, one problem arises from the various applications of blending theory to the analysis of narrative: As the reader of this volume will find, the blends described in the chapters are sometimes regarded to be ‘in’ the text, and sometimes to be ‘in’ the reader; in some cases they are understood to have been put there, consciously or unconsciously, by the author; in other cases they are understood as being realized by the reader, whether by authorial intention or without the author’s planning. Whose blend, then, are we talking about when we speak of blend in a narrative [. . .], and how can we be sure that the blends someone has analysed are really there? (Schneider 2012, 7)46

If we take into consideration that one of the most hotly disputed issues in the theory of narrativity and coherence is the question of where these phenomena are located (see section 2.3.3), it does not come as a surprise that the application of blending theory to narratives leads to a similar problem: that of identifying the textual versus cognitive-interpretative portions involved in narrative blending. The Pyramid of narrativity offers a solution to this problem inasmuch as narrative processes of blending are a form of narrativity in actualisation whose dynamics arise per definitionem from the interaction of a particular text (or other semiotic object) with a particular reader. The results are idiosyncratic, individual blends – that is, various resultative narrativities, which are not “there”, in the text itself, as an objective truth. Schneider’s question indicates indeed a worry considering the objectivity of blends. If the blends are not “there”, in the text, how can we guarantee the objectivity of our blending-theoretical analyses? I see two possible answers to this question. On the one hand, I think that the objectivity of our analyses can only be measured in terms of general norms of scientificy, such as their adequacy and intelligibility, especially in view of the overall gestalt and of the details of the respective (semiotic) text. On the other hand, admitting that the reader plays an active role in the analysis does not necessarily mean opening the doors to arbitrariness; it all depends on how one conceptualises the complex relationship between the text and the reader. Wolfgang Iser has provided an epoch-

44 With regard to multiperspectivity, see sections 4.3.3.3–4.3.3.5. 45 With regard to isotopic semantics, see section 6.3.3. 46 Interestingly, this problem of locating blends does not occur in Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) blending theory. In their approach, processes of conceptual integration take place in the cognition of individuals. Linguistic signs, texts or other semiotic objects trigger these cognitive processes, serve as a means for prompting conceptual blends, compressions or decompressions, but cannot themselves be blends.

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making contribution to this debate, crucial for understanding the Pyramid of narrativity.

3.1.4 Coherence in literary theory (Iser) Iser’s Act of Reading (1978) constitutes a “theory of aesthetic response (Wirkungstheorie) and not [. . .] a theory of the aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionstheorie)” (Iser 1978, x), since it does not deal with “existing readers”, but with what “is brought about by the text” through the “dialectic relationship between text, reader, and their interaction” (ibid). Iser’s theory examines what happens between the text and the reader: “Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure and its recipient”, since “the study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text”, i.e., “acts of concretization” (1978, 20–21). Iser thus focuses on the dynamics that take place between the reader and the text as the “two poles” of the literary work. But if Iser does not deal with the response of existing readers, what kind of reader is meant? Iser introduces the concept of the “implied reader”, which “has its roots firmly planted in the structure of the text” (Iser 1978, 34). The implied reader “embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect” and “prestructures the role to be assumed by the recipient” (34). This concept “designates a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text” (34). The implied reader is inherently a dialectical concept,47 which connects “Textstruktur” (“textual structure”) and “Aktstruktur” (“structured acts”). The “textual structure” refers to the composition of the text, to the world and worldview created by it and to the reader’s unfamiliarity with this world. In the case of the novel, the textual structure is primarily composed of “a system of perspectives designed to transmit the individuality of the author’s vision” (35), namely the perspectives of the narrator, the characters, the plot and the fictitious reader. The reader, as s/he reads through the text, performs “structured acts”: s/he assumes all the different vantage points that are sequentially

47 The dialectic of two kinds of “structures” (or codes) corresponds remarkably well with Lotman’s idea of asymmetrical binarism as the source of creativity as well as with Lotman’s (2001) claim of a related indeterminacy. Both creativity and indeterminacy are related to Iser’s two-fold act of reading: for Iser, consistency-building, as it happens through the interplay of “textual structure” and “structured acts”, is a creative process, and this process is due to a certain degree of indeterminacy that inheres in the double-coded nature of the act of reading (see below).

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presented by the text and gradually joins them together so as to make them “converge on a general meeting place” (Iser 1978, 35). “Structured acts” aim at the ultimate “coalescence” of the diverse viewpoints in the vantage point of the whole text,48 which, according to Iser, corresponds with the meaning of the text. The whole process of integration (i.e., coherence in progress) is tacit: the text does not represent it, but provides the reader with the conditions to perform it (see 35–36). Inasmuch as the reader has his/her own vantage point or worldview, the “structured acts” ultimately establish a connection between the text’s viewpoint (i.e., the text meaning) and the reader’s viewpoint or “disposition”. Here, full coalescence is not achieved. As the duality between “textual structure” and “structured acts” indicates, “the one can never fully be taken over by the other” (37). Instead, there is a “tension” between the world view of the text, as it may be constituted by the reader, and the reader’s world view (see Iser 1978, 37). The idea of “virtuality” further concretises the nature of the work of art with regard to the dynamics that take place between these two sides. The work of art “cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader [. . .]. As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too” (21). Correspondingly, Iser considers “meaning” as “a dynamic happening” (22), which aims at the creation of a consistent interpretation or gestalt (see 119). These processes of “consistency-building” (119) rely on the “the wandering viewpoint” of the reader (i.e., on the reader’s online processing of the text). Reading happens in a temporally sequential manner, but this linear way of reading is intertwined with the establishment of complex conceptual connections between actually activated or foregrounded information and backgrounded or previously processed information. Iser’s theory thus prefigures, in a way, more elaborated psycholinguistic theories such as Van den Broek et al.’s landscape model. “These syntheses [. . .] are primarily groupings that bring the interrelated perspectives together in an equivalence that has the character of a configurative meaning” (119). The holistic conceptual unity that is the result of these synthetic readerly activities (resultative coherence) relies on the potential connectivity of textual signs, realised by the reader (see 120–121). [. . .] the consistent gestalt endows the linguistic signs with their significance [. . .] The gestalt coherency might be described [. . .] as the perceptual noema of the text. This means that as each linguistic sign conveys more than just itself to the mind of the reader, it must be joined together in a single unit with all its referential contexts. The unit of the

48 This assumption of an integration of the various vantage points of the narrative complies with Dancygier’s (2012b) model (see section 2.3.5).

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perceptual noema comes about by way of the reader’s acts of apprehension: he identifies the connections between the linguistic signs and thus concretizes the references not explicitly manifested in those signs. The perceptual noema therefore links up the signs, their implications, their reciprocal influences, and the reader’s acts of identification, and through it the text begins to exist as a gestalt in the reader’s consciousness. (Iser 1978, 121)

It is this “potential connectivity” (“ausgesparte Anschließbarkeit”, Iser 1976, 284) that is denoted by Iser’s concept of “blanks” (“Leerstellen”): What we have called the blank arises out of the indeterminacy of the text [. . .]; the blank [. . .] designates a vacancy in the overall system of the text, the filling of which brings about an interaction of textual patterns. In other words, the need for completion is replaced here by the need for combination. It is only when the schemata of the text are related to one another that the imaginary object can begin to be formed, and it is the blanks that get this connecting operation under way. They indicate that the different segments of the text are to be connected, even though the text itself does not say so. [. . .] when the schemata and perspectives have been linked together, the blanks ‘disappear’. (Iser 1978, 182–183)

Iser’s literary theory assumes, just like linguistic and cognitivist accounts of coherence, that significance or meaning depends on coherence: “Consistency-building is the indispensable basis for all acts of comprehension” (1978, 125). This coherence arises through acts of linking linguistic signs and their conceptual correlations, of elaborating on these conceptual connections and of building up an integrated mental structure (gestalt). If the literary work itself thus has to be understood as a dynamic entity, coherence in progress constitutes a crucial part of it: “Der Text gelangt folglich erst durch die Konstitutionsleistung eines ihn rezipierenden Bewußtseins zu seiner Gegebenheit, so daß sich das Werk zu seinem eigentlichen Charakter als Prozeß nur im Lesevorgang zu entfalten vermag” (Iser 1976, 39).49 Correspondingly, Iser contends, in opposition to the Russian formalists, “that art does not complicate or protract the perception of objects, but through its different degrees of complexity it impedes the acts of ideation which form the basis for the constitution of meaning” (Iser 1987, 187–188). Coherence in progress is thus understood as a readerly effort that characterises the artistic nature of literature. It is important to note, however, that, according to Iser, the efforts of different readers do not lead necessarily to the creation of the same gestalt (in the sense of an objectively correct interpretation). Quite the contrary: “The impeded 49 “The text achieves its existence only through the structured acts of a receiving consciousness, such that the work can only transform itself into its genuinely processual nature through the act of reading” (translation mine). I was not able to find this sentence in the official English translation (Iser 1978).

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process of ideation [. . .] allows a variety of definitive gestalten to emerge from the same text” (1978, 188). Iser thus defines the literary work of art via individual acts of coherence in progress that lead to a variety of reader-dependent resultative coherences. But none of these resultative coherences grasps the nature of the work of art, since the latter induces different readers to develop divergent resultative coherences (called “acts of definition” in the following quote): Indeed, it is a quality peculiar to literary works that they provoke such acts of definition, which may themselves be varied in character. This is why it is so difficult to grasp literary texts independently of such acts of definition. Their very elusiveness forces the observer to try to pin them down, but the tendency when he does so is to confuse the quality of his definition with the nature of the text, whereas the nature of the text is to induce these acts of definition without ever being identical to their results. (Iser 1978, 26)

Iser casts thus doubt on objectivist norms of interpretation; but he also refuses to accept being understood as someone who approves of arbitrariness. As he explains with regard to the ideal of perfect text comprehension, [t]he very fact that this ideality has to be brought about, and indeed conveyed, by interpretation shows that it is not directly given to the reader, and so we can safely say that the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations. This, however, is not the same as saying that comprehension is arbitrary, for the mixture of determinacy and indeterminacy conditions the interaction between the text and reader, and such a two-way process cannot be called arbitrary. (Iser 1978, 24, orig. emphasis)

There are two important (and interrelated) differences between Iser’s theory and the approaches considered above. Firstly, the theories examined above concentrate on comprehension, while Iser is (in addition) concerned with interpretation (as well as with the relationship between the two). This difference can be ascribed to a second disparity, which concerns the divergent scientific paradigms to which the different approaches pertain. Linguistics often seems to aim at the development of theories that explain linguistic competence by offering models that allow the processes that lead to successful comprehension (or to the production of well-formed linguistic utterances) to be followed. Although the corresponding approaches partly model the dynamic processes that lead to successful understanding, they are indeed teleological in nature: the processes are examined only to the extent to which they allow for the explanation of how the correct result arises. Iser’s literary theory, on the contrary, disapproves of the hypothesis of the existence of a unique “correct” result of literary reception. If the nature of the literary work does not consist simply in an “encoded” message or content (such as a storyworld), which readers have to reconstruct correctly, but in a potential of meaning, which opens a spectrum of possible (resultative) coherences and meanings, then it is the processes of interpretative coherence themselves (in

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their “multiplicity”, as one could say with a side-glance to Deleuze and Guattari) that form the core of interest. The Pyramid of narrativity builds on these assumptions by attributing a central role to the interplay between the text and the reader, that is, to the level of narrativity in actualisation as an autonomous stage of narrativity. But are narrative dynamics really as autonomous and important as the Pyramid suggests?

3.2 Narrativity in actualisation, coherence and literariness Most narratologists would probably oppose deeming the stage of narrative dynamics (narrativity in actualisation) as “autonomous” because narrative or narrativity is very often equated with resultative narrative coherence (i.e., with the stage of resultative narrativity). Lotman’s considerations can serve as an example of how theorists reduce narrativity, as a generic quality, to resultative narrativity: A speech utterance inevitably organizes material in temporal and causal coordinates since these are inherent to the structure of language. However, in a sentence we clearly perceive the compulsion of grammatical organization of the material, but in the higher levels of syntagmatic organization what we notice are the principles of narrative organization. Narration presupposes that the text is coherent. [. . .] The semantic coherence of narrative segments is what forms plot, and plot is as much the law of a narrative text as syntagmatic ordering is the law for correct speech. (Lotman 2001, 222–223, emphasis mine)

By establishing an analogy between language in general (“speech utterances”) and narrative, Lotman adopts the linguistic paradigm whose aim it is to theorise linguistic competence, that is, the structure of well-formed utterances. Correspondingly, he defines narrativity as a kind of narrative well-formedness, which is effectively brought about by resultative narrative coherence in the form of the “plot”, considered to be narrative’s guiding “principl[e] of organization”. This conception of plot corresponds to the pyramidal level of resultative narrativity inasmuch as the plot guarantees and brings about a well-organised, narrative gestalt. Karin Kukkonnen has, however, recently argued that the notion of plot is characterised by a conceptual caesura, which is brought about by a dissent, in narratology, on whether plot refers to the resultative gestalt of the narrative (that is, to plot “as a fixed, global structure” and as the “configuration of the arrangement of all story events, from beginning, middle to end”, Kukkonen 2014, 706) or to the narrative dynamics that aim at creating this gestalt (that is, plot “as progressive structuration” and as the “connections between story events, motivations and consequences as readers perceive them”, 706):

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The basic divergence in the discussion around plot occurs between critics who consider plot as the fixed pattern that will have emerged at the end of the narrative [. . .] and critics who consider plot as a dynamic development in the progress of the narrative [. . .]. (Kukkonen 2014, 708)

This conceptual caesura mirrors the Pyramid’s distinction between narrative dynamics and narrative gestalt, that is, between narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity. Kukkonen does not position herself in favour of one or the other notion of plot. Instead, she argues that plot should be conceptualised in terms of both its dynamic and static dimensions: “It seems important [. . .] to remember that plot is both the process that facilitates readers’ engagement with a story and its target, a pattern of meaning” (2014, 708). The Pyramid’s distinction between narrative dynamics and a narrative gestalt allows both to differentiate between the two conceptions of plot and to integrate them into an overarching notion of plot, provided that plot constitutes an important dimension of Narrativity. The question of coherence thus plays a crucial role for the notion of plot, which is closely intertwined with the notion of the storyworld. While plot focuses on the coherence of the events and actions as they are presented by a narrative and/or processed by readers, the notion of storyworld focuses on the (dynamic creation of a) coherent mental representation of (and on the reader’s fictive immersion into)50 the world in which the plot develops. These two terms are all the more important for understanding narrativity as they imply a range of narratemes, which count simultaneously as key aspects of narrative coherence. Herman notes, for example, that “time, space and character can be redescribed as key parameters for narrative worldbuilding” (Herman et al. 2012, 17). Such “key parameters” are characterised by the same duality of resultative coherence and coherence in progress as the overarching notions of plot and/or storyworld. Four examples: (i) Time. For Ricœur, narrativity is warranted by a resultative coherence that arises with the dynamic creation of temporal closure on the level of plot (“the formal principle of temporal configuration”, Ricœur 1985, 28). Plot was first defined, on the most formal level, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents, in other words, that transforms this variety into a unified and complete story. This formal definition opens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plots so long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. (Ricœur 1985, 8, emphasis mine)

50 Herman, for instance, considers “the creation of and (more or less sustained) imaginative relocation to narrative worlds [. . .] as a core aspect of all narrative experiences – as an enabling condition for storytelling practices as such” (Herman et al. 2012, 17).

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(ii) Character. According to Schneider (2000), the creation of mental representations of literary characters takes part in the creation of the (larger) narrative situation model. In this context, he explains that the narrative situation model not only comprises scripts and scenarios (i.e., sequential event patterns), but also overarching solid aspects of fictive illusion (such as character traits) that are not bound to a specific event and situation (see Schneider 2000, 68). He emphasises the various cognitive operations that have to be carried out by the readers in order to create mental representations of characters, which turn the latter into a complex, flexible, dynamic and interactive “mental model”, which can be elaborated, modified and revised (see 80). (iii) Perspective. Dancygier (2012b) considers narrative coherence to arise through the compression of viewpoints. Readers reach the highest degree of narrative coherence as they construct the story viewpoint space, which is the result of the dynamics of blending and conceptual integration that develop between various embedded narrative spaces. Hartner (2012) bases his theory of “perspectival interaction” on blending theory as well. He claims that character representations, perspectival constructs and situation models are interdependent entities, which develop through the interplay of mental spaces. He analyses their complex interaction in terms of dynamic conceptual networks, which include processes of cross space mapping, composition, completion and elaboration. (iv) CAUSALITY. Already in 1984, Trabasso, Secco and Van den Broek analysed story comprehension in terms of coherence, the latter emerging out of the creation of a causal network: [. . .] we have shown how people might generate causal network and causal chain representations, which could be used in retelling stories, determining important events, and answering why questions. We found that events that were in a causal chain were recalled and retained over one week better than events that lacked causes or consequences. We found that the coherence of a story and its memorability were related directly when we defined coherence in terms of the percentage of events on the causal chain. We found that recall of events increased as the number of connections an event had increased, although this factor was of lesser value than being in the causal chain. [. . .] One is tempted to treat the causal episodic structure as a representational unit in memory. This structure arises from a general consideration of viewing story understanding in terms of an attempt by the comprehender to infer relations among events in terms of human goals and purposes. (Trabasso et al. 1984, 108)

But what is the relationship between the “causal chain” and the “causal network”? Although there are avenues that favour one path over the other, in approaches such as that of Trabasso, Secco and Van den Broek “the causal chain goes through the network, connecting the most important story events (i.e., events located on

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the critical path that defines the transition between the initial and final states)” (Tapiero 2007, 124). Concerning the competition between causal-chain and causalnetwork models, Tapiero judges the latter to be more adequate, explaining that “several authors have demonstrated the greater psychological relevance of the network representation” (123). She highlights the dynamic changes that take place in mental representation networks: [. . .] a text representation is more complicated than a simple network suggests: The connections in a network differ in strengths [. . .], and the ‘landscape’ of perceived connection strengths changes as readers reread the text. These findings reinforce the idea that the construction of a coherent memory representation is a dynamic activity. (Tapiero 2007, 136)

In a nutshell, particular narratemes (such as time, character or causality), which partake jointly in the narrative macro-construction of the plot (and/or storyworld), live by the same duality as the overarching notion of plot itself, namely by a duality that opposes dynamic processes of narrative comprehension to their successful completion in the form of static, resultative constructs. But does this justify speaking of an “autonomy” of the level of narrative dynamics? While I would answer this question in the affirmative, the idea of “autonomy” needs to be clarified in order to avoid misunderstandings. By calling narrative dynamics – that is, the level of narrativity in actualisation – an “autonomous” stage of narrativity, I do not mean to say that narrative dynamics are somehow independent from the stage of virtual narrativity nor that they cannot bring about (or serve the goal of creating) resultative narrativity. By claiming an “autonomy” of the stage of narrative dynamics, I wish to underscore (i) the necessity of conceptual differentiation; (ii) the possibility of unsuccessful or unfinished narrativity and (iii) the “literary” function of “enlarged” (or “prolonged”) and “diversified” narrativity in actualisation. My considerations on the notion of plot (see above) have already highlighted (i) the necessity of conceptual differentiation. Most narratological concepts (ranging from “macro”-concepts such as plot to “micro”-concepts such as character) are accompanied by a narratological discussion on whether they denote a textual or a reader-dependent phenomenon and on whether they are dynamic or staticresultative in nature. The Pyramid’s distinction between virtual narrativity, narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity therefore provides a necessary systematic distinction, which allows a broad range of narratological notions to be structured according to their virtual, dynamic and resultative dimensions. In this connection, the achievement of the Pyramid of narrativity consists of the fact that it provides the dynamic components of narrative dimensions with a proper label

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(narrativity in actualisation), embeds it ontologically (by locating it between the virtual and resultative stages of Narrativity) and thereby counteracts a broad range of superfluous discussions on the dynamic versus static-resultative, on the textual versus readerly shape of various narratological concepts (including the concept of narrativity itself). Especially by differentiating explicitly between the dynamic and resultative dimensions of narrative and narrativity, the model works against reductive, unilateral narratological models, which overemphasise, in a hegemonic manner, either the dynamic or the resultative dimension of narrative phenomena and allows, moreover, narratological positions, theories and research interests to be “located” within pyramidal space and stages. Secondly, the “autonomy” of the stage of narrativity in actualisation refers to (ii) the possibility that narrative processing, and thus the process of creating a coherent gestalt, can be unsuccessful. In such cases, the creation of pyramidal narrativity is not finished, such that the stage of resultative narrativity and the meaningful summit of narrativity is not reached (i.e. constructed) by the reader. Following Herman’s (2002) considerations, one could argue that there are two possible reasons for such an interruption of the construction of pyramidal narrativity. Herman argues that narrativity vanishes at an upper and lower threshold of narrativity, the latter being constituted by boredom (“stereotypicality outstrips remarkableness, with canonicity leaving no room for breach”, Herman 2002, 103), the former by a cognitive overload, which is the effect of narratives that set “so many diverse, even conflicting, scripts into play that processors [. . .] find themselves unable to structure oversaturated sequences into coherent, narratively organized wholes” (Herman 2002, 103). Dancygier, for her part, has highlighted that “fragmented and ostensibly incoherent stories [. . .] stretch the cognitive abilities of ‘making sense’ to their limits” (Dancygier 2012b, 11); this thought implies that narrative processing and sense-making can break down if the narrative’s difficulty goes beyond the receiver’s “limits”. Fludernik’s definition of narrativity in terms of narrativisation implies the danger of failure as well since readers have to “naturaliz[e] texts by recourse to narrative schemata” (1996, 34) especially “when confronting textual or semantic inconsistencies” (31); consequently, there may exist narratives whose inconsistencies are so extreme that they resist the reader’s attempts to “impos[e] narrativity” (34) on them. Fludernik would certainly argue that such a failure of imposing narrativity upon a text would make it impossible to ascribe narrativity to the text. The text could thus not be considered as a narrative any more. I contend, by contrast, that receivers do not have to deny automatically the text its narrative (generic) status. As we will see in the second part of this study, the consequence of the narrative’s resistance against interpretative closure

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might lead simply to a judgment on the narrative’s quality, and this judgment might be either a devaluation or an upvaluation.51 Thirdly, by speaking of the “autonomy” of the stage of narrativity in actualisation, I also mean to underscore (iii) the special role that narrative dynamics play in a broad range of literary narrative texts. While all kinds of narratives must be processed and do thus necessarily imply the stage of narrative dynamics, I contend that it is part of the design and intention of certainly not all, but of many literary texts to enlarge (i.e. prolong) the stage of narrativity in actualisation. Considering the enlargement of the stage of narrativity in actualisation, one can observe that many literary narratives create, through their design, the conditions for a reception that has to engage in intense and (more or less highly) complicated processes of coherence in progress, which thereby become extended or prolonged. In other words, readers cannot process the narrative information easily and quickly; instead, they experience problems either with constructing a coherent gestalt, schema or “situation model” or with providing the latter with meaning. Theories of literariness have repeatedly pointed to such difficulties of processing as an important characteristics of literary texts. Victor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie (translated as “estrangement”, “defamiliarisation” or – recently – as “enstrangement”) highlights the functionality and autonomous value of literary stylistic devices whose aim is to impede or retard the creation of (resultative) coherence. He claims that art aims “to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony” (2015, 162) and that art achieves this goal by the device of “the ‘enstrangement’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception” (162). As I have argued more extensively elsewhere,52 Shklovsky’s formalist approach offers many contact points to cognitive theory, especially to schema theory, as his literary examples show. He claims, for instance, that “Tolstoy’s method of enstrangement consists in not calling a thing or event by its name but by describing it as if seen for the first time” (163). Using the terms of cognitive linguistics, one could paraphrase Shklovsky’s point as follows: Tolstoy avoids activating the abstract, cognitive schema that would provide the different narrated contents with an overarching cognitive structure and coherence. Tolstoy thereby prevents the fast “recognition” of the narrated action in terms of familiar cognitive scripts, that is, the reader’s swift ascension onto the level of resultative narrativity. Readers thus remain longer on the stage of narrativity in actualisation in search of the narrative 51 Kafka’s difficult novels, for instance, are culturally highly valuated, while Toussaint’s novels have partly been received with enthusiasm and partly been savaged (see chapter 5 and section 6.5). 52 See Wagner (forthcoming).

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schema or gestalt that could provide the narrated action with (resultative) coherence. Shklovsky’s enstrangement and its effects of deautomatisation are reliant upon literary devices that are “deviant”, norm-breaking and difficult inasmuch as they evade either familiar cognitive-linguistic orders (concepts, schemata, etc.) or the established orders of literary conventions.53 Considered from this angle, his conception of poetry as “difficult, laborious language which puts the brakes on perception” (Shklovsky 2015, 171) underscores the “chaotic”54 potential of narrative literature, that is, the ways by which it confuses readers and forces them into processes of coherence in progress, which take their time.55 To the extent that these chaotic or confusing qualities of poetry have the function “to make us feel things” again, that is, to “deautomatise” us on a mental level, Shklovsky does emphasise the idea of a “refreshing” cognitive-perceptual experience. This idea of cognitive refreshment has been explored in greater detail by Cook who maintains that literary discourse serves the function of “schema refreshment”: My claim is that the primary56 function of certain discourses is to effect a change in the schemata of their readers. Sensations of pleasure, escape, profundity, and elevation are conceivably offshoots of this function. So too is the high social esteem afforded to discourse with no other apparent social or practical function. (Cook 1994, 191)

Cook argues that literary texts can have defamiliarizing effects on three kinds of schemata: language schemata, text schemata and world schemata. This idea corresponds to the connection, visualised by an arrow in figure 6b, between the narrative gestalt and the cognitive-affective system of the reader. Narrative dynamics can result in the creation of a new (or in the modification of a familiar) cognitive gestalt or schema, which effects changes in the cognitive-affective system of the reader. Cook underlines, however, two problems of his theory. On the one hand, the concrete quality of schema refreshment is hard to pin down, since it is reader-dependent (see Cook 1994, 192). The Pyramid of narrativity does justice to this insight by integrating individual readers onto the level of virtual narrativity. On the other hand, he notes that schema refreshment

53 “The forms most characteristic of Sterne are those which result from the displacement and violation of conventional forms” (Shklovsky 1990, 156). 54 “The difference between the conventional novel and that of Sterne is analogous to the difference between a conventional poem with sonorous instrumentation and a Futurist poem composed in transrational language [. . .] Upon first picking Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we are overwhelmed by a sense of chaos” (Shklovsky 1990, 147). 55 See his “definition of poetry as decelerated, distorted speech” (2015, 172). 56 It should be noted that Cook avoids the over-generalised claim that literariness is schema refreshment (see Cook 1994, 192).

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depends on literary-historical contexts. Insofar as schema-refreshing discourse can become conventionalised, Cook declares a “lack of fit between the literary canon and the category of ‘schema-refreshing discourse’” (194).57 The Pyramid of narrativity solves this problem by integrating literary-historical contexts into the model – both under the label of “contexts” and in form of the “anthropological (un)ground of narrativity”, with its narrative conventions, practices and traditions. That processes of coherence in progress and meaning-making are of special importance for the reception of literature is somehow self-evident, inasmuch as we teach, at our universities, the analysis and interpretation of literary objects, which per se do not lend themselves to a direct understanding. Why would our culture valuate difficult, opaque narratives by integrating them into a literary canon and by teaching their interpretation as a part of academic education, if these texts fulfilled only insufficiently (if at all) their goal of mediating effectively and quickly a coherent, meaningful, intelligible story? Briefly, the reader’s quick ascension onto the level of resultative narrativity does not seem to be the goal or function of most or even all literary narratives; instead, many literary texts seem to require readers to abide on the stage of narrativity in actualisation. Reuven Tsur (2008) has made a similar point. He identifies two opposed “attitudes” or cognitive “decision styles”, which represent the extreme ends of a scale of an “implied critic’s”58 interpretative behaviour. The first, called “negative capability”, is characterised (as Tsur explains with reference to Keats) as “delayed closure” (514). This term denotes the capacity of “being in uncertainties” (511) and of admitting during interpretation “alternative and seemingly contrary hypotheses” (Weitz, qtd. in Tsur 2008, 513). The other style – labelled positivism or factualism (511) – refers to an “intolerance of ambiguity” (515), to an “irritable reaching after fact and reason” (512, 518), that is, to a need to arrive quickly at interpretative results. According to Tsur, this need unfortunately tends to produce overly simplistic accounts of complex literary phenomena. In a nutshell, according to Tsur’s distinction, adequate literary processing is to a certain extent reliant upon “delayed closure” – that is, upon a mode of reception that fits Shklovsky’s idea of an “enstranged” discourse, which “increases the duration and complexity” (Shklovsky 2015, 162) of literary processing.

57 “This is hardly surprising, as the canon tends to be defined, not for specific readers, but for – and by – a dominant social group speaking in institutions at a particular time in history. The concept of schema-refreshing discourse, on the other hand, must be related to as many variations as there are between epochs, individuals, and social groups” (Cook 1994, 194). 58 As Tsur notes, “the implied critic can be defined as the person whose decisions are reflected in a given piece of criticism” (2008, 511, orig. emphasis deleted).

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To be clear, the goal of these considerations is not to defend one or another conception of literariness. The search for literariness as a transtextually and transhistorically valuable notion, which should cover the “essential”59 quality of literature, resembles, as Winko as explained, the search for the “world formula”: “if it existed and was [widely] accepted, everything would be easier” (2009, 374, translation mine). This search has not yet been successful.60 As has often been stated, the most popular candidates for literariness – fictionality, a specific “artful” language (usage) and the lack of a predetermined pragmatic function – emphasise important characteristics of many (but not all) literary texts, but fail to apply to all (and exclusively to) literary texts.61 Furthermore, the attribution of literary qualities is dependent on various (social, cultural, situational, literary, historical, normative) contexts62 and on the individuality of readers and readings63; it thus evades an

59 Derrida, for instance, calls the possibility of finding essential “literary” characteristics into question, emphasising “that the existence of something like a literary reality in itself will always remain problematic. [. . .] No internal criterion can guarantee the essential ‘literariness’ of a text. There is no assured essence or existence of literature. If you proceed to analyse all the elements of a literary work, you will never come across literature itself, only some traits which it shares or borrows, which you can find elsewhere too, in other texts, be it a matter of the language, the meaning or the referents (‘subjective’ or ‘objective’). And even the convention which allows a community to come to an agreement about the literary status of this or that phenomenon remains precarious, unstable and always subject to revision” (Derrida 2003, 32–33). 60 “Kein Kandidat für ein textinternes Literarizitätskriterium hat allgemeine Zustimmung erhalten, und selbst für minimalistische Lösungen ist ein disziplinärer Konsens ausgeblieben” (Winko 2009, 374). 61 As Eagleton (2010), for example, has explained, literature also contains non-fictional texts (e.g. biographies) and excludes some fictional texts (e.g. comic strips); the idea of a specific artful literary form or gestalt disregards the importance of both literary contents (subjects and references to the world) and of the historical changes that literary forms undergo; and the criterion of non-pragmatic discourse leaves out of consideration the reader, who can a read a text either pragmatically or not. Köppe and Gottschalk (2006) provide a useful introduction into problems of defining literariness. 62 As Matuschek (2010) reminds us, already Schlegel has pointed out that the most all-encompassing notion of literature would correspond to the history of literature itself. Dickie, for his part, emphasises that definitions tend to be built on “prominent but accidental features”, which take into account only “a particular stage in its [literature’s, ESW] historical development” (1974, 20). 63 As Esau and Yost put it, perceived or ascribed literariness depends on the “unique response in each reader” (1976, 7). This includes each reader’s declarative and procedural knowledge (see Viehoff 1988), taste and competence: Esau and Yost draw on the “problem of discriminating between good and poor readings [. . .]” (1976, 7). Miall and Kuiken’s (1999) empirical study suggests that “literariness is the product of a distinctive mode of reading” (122). According to the authors, this mode of reading is identifiable “through three key components of response to literary texts”, namely the detection of striking stylistic variations, corresponding “defamiliarizing responses” as well as the subsequent “transformation of a conventional feeling or concept” (Miall and Kuiken

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essentialist definition. Thus, far from aiming at a definition of literariness, I have drawn on some literary theories in order to show that their analyses of literary qualities converge with my claim that certain literary narrative texts complicate the creation of resultative coherence, thereby “prolonging” or “delaying” the reader’s ascent onto the pyramidal level of resultative narrativity and thus “extending” or “enlarging” the stage of narrativity in actualisation. What further undergirds this assumption is the central role that phenomena such as ambiguity,64 the palimpsest65 or polyphony66 play in literary studies. While these notions do not per se “define” literariness, they are nonetheless designed to describe a specific structural quality of (many) literary texts, which is considered to be of special importance for the understanding and the valuation of literary texts, namely the ways in which literary texts provoke readers to blend different meanings, logics,67 voices or codes.68 As an effect of reception, such literary works are perceived as somehow complex, “overcoded” or dense. Schmidt’s “polyvalence convention”69 correlates with the heightened complexity of such literary objects of

1999, 122). Fish, for his part, argues that the meaning (or literariness, as I would add) of a text does not reside in the text itself, but in the “system of intelligibility” (Fish 1980, 316, 329) in which the respective receiver is embedded: all communication “occurs only within [. . .] a system (or context, or situation, or interpretive community) and [. . .] the understanding achieved by two or more persons is specific to that system and determinate only within its confines” (1980, 304). Considered from this angle, literariness can be said to be a judgmental product of specific sociocultural systems and, within these systems, of what Bourdieu (1996) calls the “literary field”. If so, however, “literary theory might lose its apparent distance from the object of study as an analytical and descriptive undertaking. Seen from outside, literary theory turns out to be a discursive practice intertwined with literature, science, and education” (Juvan 2003, 78). 64 I elaborate on the subject of ambiguity in section 4.1. 65 See Genette (1997). 66 See Bachtin (1994) and section 4.3.1. 67 According to Ette, literary “knowledge for living is bound up in life experiences but never tied to a single logic. Rather, the term implies the ability to think and act simultaneously according to different sets of logic” (2010, 986). 68 See, e.g., Lotman (2001), Koschorke (2012). 69 “Hypothesis about the POLYVALENCE CONVENTION: It is shared knowledge in our society for all participants in aesthetic communicative interaction that (a) text producers are not bound by the monovalence convention; (b) text receivers have the freedom to produce different communicative texts from the same surface text in different times and situations, and they expect others to do likewise; (c) text receivers rate the realization of aesthetic communicative texts as optimal, though the grounds for this rating may differ among participants and situations; (d) text mediators and post-processors should not act in conflict with the aspects of the polyvalence convention in (a) through (c)” (Schmidt 1982, 58–59, orig. emphasis).

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research, which do not only call for intense processes of coherence in progress, but also have the potential of producing more than one interpretative result – or, as one could say with regard to narrative literature, of producing several resultative narrativities and narrative meanings. One important question, however, has not yet been answered. What exactly is denoted by the label of “narrative dynamics”, which take place at the stage of narrativity in actualisation? If this label did not cover more than Iser’s “interaction” between the text and the reader or than the general cognitive-linguistic insights into (narrative) discourse processing (e.g. into the interplay of bottom-up and topdown processes and the building of a situation model), then its added value would be highly disputable. The last chapter will address these very important questions and concerns.

3.3 Narrative dynamics: Between theory and interpretation So far, the present study has conceptualised narrative dynamics as narrative processes of coherence in progress, which develop in and through the interaction of the reader with the text and which aim at the creation of a (resultatively) coherent narrative gestalt (e.g. a narrative schema, situation model, storyworld or plot) and meaning. Narrative dynamics have been located, within the pyramidal model of narrativity, at the stage of narrativity in actualisation, which is ontologically anchored in virtual narrativity and which precedes resultative narrativity. As I have argued in section 3.2, conceptualising narrative dynamics as an autonomous stage of narrativity has three major advantages. Firstly, it allows for differentiation between the dynamic and the resultative dimensions of narrativity, which manifests itself in a number of narratological concepts. The added value of this differentiation consists, on the one hand, in the fact that it allows a broad range of narratological key notions to be systematised according to their dynamic versus resultative portions (e.g. plot as a dynamics versus plot as a fixed global structure). On the other hand, given that narrative theories often compete for establishing their dynamic versus static-resultative conceptualisations of narrative parameters (or of narrativity as such), the pyramidal clarification of the ontological relationship between narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity is capable of ending a superfluous debate and competition, which is all the more important as these debates and competitions repeat themselves in numerous debates on various key concepts of narrative theory. In other words, the Pyramid of narrativity, including its autonomisation of the level of narrative dynamics, offers a systematisation or “meta-structure” of narrativity, which allows various narratological positions and argumentations to be reconceptualised according to their “places” in the

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Pyramid. Secondly, the autonomisation of the stage of narrative dynamics allows unsuccessful or unfinished kinds of narrativity to be theorised against the linguistic bias towards the theorisation of “well-formed” utterances and “successful” communication. Thirdly, it places a focus on narrative dynamics as a stage of narrativity, which might be of special importance in the context of (a certain kind of) literary narratives that impede or complicate the creation of a narrative gestalt and meaning and therefore enlarge narrativity in actualisation (and prolong the reader’s engagement in narrative dynamics). These advantages represent, on the rather abstract level of narratological theory, the major added value of the pyramidal differentiation between narrativity in actualisation and resultative narrativity. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the (perhaps most important) criterion for the evaluation of narrative theories is the question of how they enhance or facilitate the concrete analysis of specific narrative texts (or other narrative semiotic objects). There is a broad consensus, in narratology, that narratology should supply a narratological “toolbox” whose tools help scholars analyse narrative texts correctly and to develop, on the basis of this analysis, adequate interpretations. What is, in this regard, the added value of the stage of narrative dynamics? Can narrative dynamics be understood as a “tool” by which narrative texts can be analysed? The answer to this question is no – narrative dynamics, in and by themselves, are not a narratological “tool”. Narrative dynamics can rather be considered as a way out of the restricted toolbox of narratology. This claim calls for an explanation. Until today, narratology is firmly anchored in its structuralist origins. Of course, narratology has, in its postclassical phase, diversified or “ramified into narratologies” (Herman 1999, 1); these developments certainly imply “a shift from text-centred or formal models to models that are jointly formal and functional” (Herman 1999, 8). Nonetheless, postclassical narratology spends much (if not most of its) effort revising the theoretical concepts that it has inherited from classical, structuralist narratology according to interests and epistemological orientation. As Herman puts it, narratological research “does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models” (1999, 3). That postclassical narratology still pursues this aim becomes apparent in the topic of the last (fifth) conference of the European Narratology Network (which took place in September 2017). In their call for papers, the organisers highlight the challenge of “metamorphosing the structures”, found and described by classical narratology, and explicitly “tur[n] scholarly attention to the potential of classical narratology once more”: “classical narratology has to un-

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dergo a thorough revision and discussion in order to show the potential of structuralist classics for further investigation of narratives and narrativity”.70 While such revisions have led to (and continue to lead) to a new awareness of the “dynamic”, readerly aspects of formerly text-based notions, this narratological orientation has the disadvantage of directing scholarly attention towards an established set of key concepts (such as story, discourse, narrator, plot, configuration, (un)reliability, etc.).71 While I do not wish to criticise the usefulness of these concepts and their discussion in general, my impression is that this direction of scholarly activities has a restrictive impetus in that it constrains narratologists to the modification of a quite restricted narratological “toolbox”, that is, of a very limited set of narratological key concepts. Why should narratologists – so to speak – “filter” their exploration of the “interplay between the way stories are designed and the processing strategies promoted by their design” (Herman 1999, 8) through the sieve of primarily structuralist concepts? From my point of view, they should not. The notion of narrative dynamics, as I conceive of it in the present study, clears the way to a free, “unsieved” exploration of narrative interactions between textual systems and the cognitive-affective systems of readers. It thereby inaugurates a new area of research, that is, a new paradigm (or “vector”) of narratology in the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, this new paradigm is simultaneously quite “classical” in the way in which it approaches its object of research inasmuch as Genette (1983), for instance, did not set out to develop or enhance a narratological toolbox; his categories emerged from the analysis of a concrete text, namely Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. While the analysis of narrative dynamics shifts the focus from textual structures to the readers’ interaction with textual structures, it shares the interest in the workings of concrete narrative objects with “classical” narratology. In other words, the focus does not lie on the refinement or modification of existing narratological tools, but in the analysis and narratological exploration of specific kinds of narrativity, as they develop in the interaction with particular narratives. But what is then the difference between narrative dynamics and interpretation? If the focus lies on particular narratives, how can we describe narrative dynamics that do not have to bear the reproach that they are subjective interpretative

70 http://www.enn5.cz/AngiologyKlon-ENN5/media/system/ENN5-CFP-2017.pdf, page 1 (Accessed: 27 September 2017). 71 For example, an anthology that has been edited by Brian Richardson focuses, as the title suggests, on “narrative dynamics”, which are understood as “the movement of a narrative from its opening to its end” (Richardson 2002, 1). But the understanding of these narrative dynamics is constrained, as the subtitle and structure of the book reveals, by the inventory of classical core concepts: time, plot, sequencing, beginnings, ends and frames.

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acts of an individual reader? And who is or should be the reader on which we build our analysis of particular narrative dynamics? Considering the first question, one cannot say that narrative dynamics are interpretations, but that they are based on interpretations. If narratology conceptualises itself as a discipline that enables or helps interpreters to analyse and interpret narratives adequately, it goes, to a certain extent, wrong, because there is a large amount of scholars who analyse and interpret literary narrative without using or caring much about the narratological “toolbox” and who yet come to convincing and interesting results. These interpretative results, however, can often hardly be brought into an intelligible connection with the restricted number of narratological concepts. In other words, literary scholars deal, in their interpretations, with a number of interpretative problems and engage therefore in various “narrative dynamics”, which should allow them to create a coherent interpretative (narrative) gestalt and meaning. Why should we, as narratologists, not benefit and learn from the readings (and expertise) of interpreters and “invert” the direction of “assistance” by theorising actual narrative dynamics, which have been performed by (professional) readers,72 in order to learn something about the interplay of (literary) narrative structures and effects, in its manifoldness? One could counter, however, that the goal of theories and theoretical concepts is to discover general, transindividual phenomena, rules or other kinds of regularities, which transcend the realm of the subjective and idiosyncratic. I agree with this argument; I would therefore like to emphasise that the exploration of narrative dynamics does not amount to providing a singular and highly individual interpretative approach with a theoretical veneer. Analysing narrative dynamics means to identify, on the basis of influential or even (if possible) consensual interpretative directions, proceedings and insights, general strategies by which texts cue readers to work towards the establishment of resultative narrative coherence and meaning without allowing them to achieve this goal (directly or at all). Narrative dynamics are therefore located between the extreme ends of abstract theory and of concrete, subjective, individual interpretation. Identifying narrative dynamics means conducting research into (i) general, transindividual problems of narrative understanding, as they are created by particular (here: literary) narrative texts (or by various narratives from the same author), and into (ii) the ways in which researchers attempt to cope with these problems. Such an endeavour can only be successful if one anchors one’s analysis of narrative

72 Even the narrative dynamics of lay readers could principally be taken into account (and/or compared to those of professional readers) inasmuch as they provide empirical evidence on the kinds of interactions that have been triggered by literary texts.

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dynamics reliably in the research that has been done on the corresponding work and/or author by the research community.73 Considering the second and third questions proposed above, I thus propose to work with a reader construct that is abstracted from a sufficiently broad range of factual (i.e. empirical), especially professional interpretations.74 Identifying and theorising narrative dynamics thus means to lay bare the different ways in which (literary) narrative texts succeed principally in impeding or prolonging the readers’ interpretative interactions with the text. Which textual properties and mechanisms do texts use in order to keep readers in the stage of narrativity in actualisation? How do narrative texts impede readers from creating a narrative gestalt and meaning, that is, from ascending onto the pyramidal level of resultative narrativity? These are the questions that are apt to lead to the identification of narrative dynamics, as long as these dynamics can be shown to be of transindividual validity. The requirement of transindividuality is indeed related both to the reader (or reading) and to the text. Not only should the narrative dynamics under consideration rely on a sufficiently broad range of reader statements, thus reflecting the effects that textual forms have on different readers. Also the textual properties or mechanisms, which have been highlighted by readers, should be analysed on a level that is abstract enough to lay bare general textual mechanisms, which could potentially be retrieved in other texts (from other authors) as well, with similar effects of interaction. Briefly, the interest that founds the analysis of narrative dynamics, on the pyramidal stage of narrativity in actualisation, is not the analysis and interpretation of the form-function interplay of a single text, as it is performed by a single reader, but the analysis of general textual mechanisms and of corresponding coping strategies, as they manifest themselves supraindividually in the writings of an interpretative community.

73 I do not think that the analysis of narrative dynamics should completely renounce the use of classical narratological terminology. My point is that our analysis should not be reduced to the application of these narratological tools, but should widen its scope of analysis by identifying larger, interpretative problems and dynamics, as they are discussed and presented by interpreters. The labels that I give to the three dynamics analysed in part B of this study can be understood as an attempt to extract, in each chapter, from a range of interpretative accounts a central, overarching narrative dynamic that is somehow characteristic of the specific literary narrativity of the corresponding work or author. 74 This does not mean that proper interpretative insights, susceptible of enriching existing analyses and interpretations, are generally prohibited. The point is rather that the analyses of narrative dynamics should not reflect exclusively the narratologist’s own reading experience; instead, they should be firmly anchored in the interpretative research literature.

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My hope and contention is that this research will bring us nearer to the goal of understanding the central, dynamic stage of narrativity in its plurality, that is, in its various (literary) manifestations. The pyramidal concept of narrative dynamics offers, in this regard, a way to bridge the deplorable gap that yawns, in narratology, between overly abstract theory and pure interpretation. Whether the analysis of narrative dynamics represents a useful new paradigm of narratological research, capable of producing new and interesting insights into the multiple workings of literary narrativity, can however only be decided on the basis of concrete analyses. The second part of this study proceeds therefore to the identification and analysis of three concrete narrative dynamics, labelled narrative projection (chapter 4 on Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses), narrative withdrawal (chapter 5 on Franz Kafka’s Schloss) and narrative resistance (chapter 6 on Toussaint’s contemporary novels). There are three theoretical backgrounds that influence my analysis of narrative dynamics in part B of this study. Firstly, the rhizome plays a crucial role in their conceptualisation, not only because the epistemology of the rhizome complies with the interplay of chaos and order that characterises the stage of narrativity in actualisation, but also because the narrative dynamics that I analyse in the following chapters combine various rhizomatic dimensions in idiosyncratic ways.75 Secondly, the theoretical notion of coherence (in progress), as it has been presented in the second and third chapters, is of utmost importance. While I am using different methods of analysis on the basis of existing linguistic, cognitive, literary and narrative theories, which are linked to the problem of coherence, including the concepts of blending, ambiguity, multiperspectivity and emplotment, schema theory has turned out to be, from a methodological perspective, an especially useful analytic tool, because it allows to make explicit which kinds of

75 See the short summary at the end of section 1.5. In a nutshell, the narrative dynamics under consideration are rhizomatic phenomena to the extent to which readers seek to establish conceptual connections (“principle of connectivity”) or a stable conceptual “network” (i.e., forms of resultative coherence), but cannot achieve this goal because of the ways in which the texts undermine either the fixation of these connections (“principle of asignifying rupture”; rhizomatic “AND”) or the creation of a stable and closed conceptual unity (“n-1”, “multiplicity without unity”). Narrative dynamics thus inherit from the rhizome its intrinsically dynamic nature and open-endedness. Moreover, the rhizomatic scepticism and resistance against representation is helpful for the acknowledgement and description of narrative dynamics in which readers who work towards the creation of a mental representation are confronted with texts that reject the goal and idea of representation. Also, the rhizomatic dialectic between deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation has heuristic value in that it correlates with literary-historical dialectics between generic renewal and conventionalisation, which (can) play a crucial role in narrative dynamics.

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knowledge (i.e. which schemata) the respective text supposedly activates in the cognitive system of the reader and how the text simultaneously fails to meet the expectations that it has raised by means of this activation. From a schema-theoretical perspective, narrative projection and narrative resistance represent contrasting or antagonistic narrative dynamics inasmuch as narrative projection can be analysed as an overfilling of one or more conceptual slots of a schema while narrative resistance is a dynamic that fails or refuses to fill one or more open conceptual schema slots. These two dynamics are primarily76 analysed with regard to the schema NARRATIVE itself, although different schema slots are concerned. Toussaint’s novels refuse to fill the slot (i.e. expectation) of narrative TELLABILITY while Laclos’s epistolary novel overfills the slot of narrative VIEWPOINT. While my analysis proceeds both via proper textual analysis and via the analysis of literary interpretations, the direction of narrative processing that corresponds to the two narrative dynamics can be characterised as relying predominantly on “top-down” processes since the major challenge for readers consists obviously in their inability to match textual input with their “narrative” expectations or habits.77 The contrast between narrative projection and narrative resistance, however, risks inscribing itself into both the orders of arborescent thinking and into narratology’s “geometrics of narrative space” (Gibson 1996, 14), that is, into the illusionist space of “geometrical clarity, symmetry and proportion” (3), which Gibson has justifiably criticised. The dynamics of narrative withdrawal (exemplified by Kafka) disrupts this symmetry and constitutes a “line of flight” of this homogenous space inasmuch as it is neither primarily reliant upon schema theory nor upon top-down processing. While readers struggle indeed with the strange kind of emplotment of Kafka’s Castle, which contrasts with narrative expectations, the major difficulties that readers experience rely, according to my analysis, primarily on the ways in which the text interrupts and undermines successful bottom-up processing, more precisely, the creation of a coherent (fictive) “frame” of reference, which would enable the conceptual integration and evaluation of incoming narrative information. (To put it simply, readers cannot construct a mental model of the storyworld and its events.) According to my analysis, the text thus thwarts the creation of any coherent narrative gestalt and interpretation (that is, the readers’ ascendance onto the level of resultative

76 As I argue, however, in section 6.4, also general cognitive (i.e. per se non-narrative) schemata play a role in the narrative dynamics of Toussaint. 77 Thus these dynamics do live by their strong connection to narrative conventions, practices and traditions, that is, to the anthropological (un)ground of narrativity (see figure 6).

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narrativity) by a variety of techniques that are designed to guarantee the irreducible inconsistency of incoming narrative information. Thirdly, the question of literariness forms an important theoretical background for my analysis of the narrative dynamics under consideration. My claim is that the “enlargement” of the stage of narrativity in actualisation, which these narratives trigger or perform, constitutes an important factor for their literariness, that is, for the fact that they have acquired either a literary status or a literary valuation. That the “literary” status and quality, which has been described to (most of) these narratives, is tightly connected to the ways in which these novels complicate or prolong the reader’s processing is quite obvious in the case of Kafka, whose narratives are famous for their difficulty and “Kafkaesque” qualities and effects, but also in the case of Laclos, whose literary chef d’œuvre is analysed and applauded by critics primarily for its masterful creation of ambiguities. An interesting borderline case is Toussaint, since there is no consensus in the literary field on the “literary” quality of his novels. Given that the major research interest of the present study lies in the connection between narrativity, coherence and literariness, it is thus of crucial interest and importance to analyse the role coherence plays in the arguments that critics present in order to argue for or against the “literariness” of Toussaint’s novels (see section 6.5).

4 “Narrative Projection”: Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses 4.1 4.1.1 4.1.2 4.1.3 4.1.4 4.1.5 4.1.6 4.2 4.3 4.3.1 4.3.2 4.3.3 4.4

Ambiguity: Forms and features 295 Ambiguity in linguistics and literary theory 295 Narrative ambiguity: Towards a framework of analysis 304 Ambiguity in narratology I: Plot-related approaches 311 Ambiguity in narratology II: The levels of discourse and textuality 318 The irreducible perspectivity of ambiguity 321 Spatial concepts of ambiguity: Layered meanings or network of meanings? 325 Jakobson’s projection principle and narrative projection 328 Les Liaisons dangereuses: Ambiguities and forms of narrative projection Introduction 334 Ambiguities and some rhizome 342 Perspectival ambiguity: Narrative projection of viewpoints in letter XLVIII Advantages and other forms of narrative projection 390

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4.1 Ambiguity: Forms and features 4.1.1 Ambiguity in linguistics and literary theory Ambiguity is generally considered to denote the lack of a 1:1 correspondence between expression and meaning. It has been theorised both in linguistics and in literary theory and plays at least implicitly also a role in narratology. In linguistics, one distinguishes between lexical, structural (syntactical) and pragmatic ambiguity. Zimmermann and Sternefeld “take (linguistic) expression as consisting of forms together with meanings. The phenomenon that one form may carry more than one meaning is known as ambiguity. Thus different expressions with the same form are said to be ambiguous; and if they are single words, linguists also speak of lexical ambiguity” (2013, 14, original emphasis deleted). Structural ambiguities, by contrast, occur when a sequence of words expresses (at least) two different meanings without containing any ambiguous words, such that the sentence may be interpreted according to different syntactic structures. This is the case, for example, in the sentence “John saw the man with the binoculars”, where the prepositional phrase “with the binoculars” can be considered to specify either the verb (“saw”) or the noun (“the man”, see Zimmermann and Sternefeld 2013, 25–26). Thirdly, pragmatic ambiguity means that an utterance can be understood as presenting different https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-005

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illocutions: “It’s drafty”, for example, can either be interpreted as a statement or as an indirect request to close the door (see Kaiser 2007, 18). Concerning theories of ambiguity in literary theory, I would like to concentrate on William Empson’s (1973) seminal study Seven Types of Ambiguity and complete my considerations by means of two more recent approaches, Reuven Tsur’s (2008; 2012) theory of cognitive poetics and an article from Lisa Otty and Andrew Michael Roberts (2013). Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, first published in 1930, is still quite influential,1 which is not astonishing inasmuch as Empson elaborates on fundamental problems and dimensions of ambiguity. While the title of his work may suggest a rigid categorisation, Empson highlights indeed “the ambiguity of ambiguity” (24): ‘Ambiguity’ itself can mean an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings. It is useful to be able to separate these if you wish, but it is not obvious that in separating them at any particular point you will not be raising more problems than you solve. (Empson 1973, 24)

Empson generally considers as ambiguous “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” (1973, 19) or “a word or a grammatical structure [which] is effective in several ways at once” (20–21), that is, cases where “the possible alternative meanings of word or grammar are used to give alternative meanings to the sentence” (92, note 6). Although Empson is known as a “New Critic” (see Tsur 2012, 102), he does not consider ambiguity to be an inherently textual phenomenon. Instead, he considers both the author and the reader as the loci where ambiguity can be “effective”: It might seem more reasonable, when dealing with obscure alternatives of syntax, to abandon the claim that you are explaining a thing communicated, to say either that you are showing what happened in the author’s mind (this should interest the biographer) or what was likely to happen in a reader’s mind (this should interest the poet). This might be more tidy, but, like many forms of doubt, it would itself claim to know too much; the rules as to what is conveyable are so much more mysterious even than the rules governing the effects of ambiguity, whether on the reader or the author, that it is better to talk about both parties at once, and be thankful if what you say is true about either. (Empson 1973, 280–281)

1 The entry on ambiguity in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Cuddon 1999), for example, provides a summary of Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. Additionally, both Tsur’s and Otty and Robert’s approaches discuss Empson’s work.

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The interpretative activities of the reader play indeed a crucial role in Empson’s account. Consider, for example, his description of the third type of ambiguity, which “may describe two situations and leave the reader to infer various things which can be said about both of them” (137, emphasis mine); or consider the sixth type of ambiguity, which “occurs when a statement says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements; so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own and they are liable to conflict with one another” (207, emphasis mine). In view of these reception-oriented implications of Empson’s theory, it is surprising to find Lisa Otty and Andrew M. Roberts arguing quite recently for “a shift from considering ambiguity in terms of aesthesis (in the sense of a relatively passive reception of an art work or experience) to thinking it in terms of poiesis (in the sense of a creative generative process of interpretation)” (2013, 38). But before discussing in detail Otty and Andrew’s approach, I would like to finish my summary of Empson. It is crucial to know that, for Empson, “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (21), poetry being understood as different from prose.2 It seems that, for Empson, lyrical poetry makes the most “poetical use of language” (45), in that it achieves the highest degree of “compactness” (44, 48), for instance by contracting several sentences into one (93), or, more generally, by achieving a high degree of “compression of thought” (190) – notably by creating different “types of ambiguity”. The seven types of ambiguity that Empson identifies are, “so far as they are not merely a convenient framework, [. . .] intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (69). For our purposes, though, the scalar nature of Empson’s typology is more interesting than a summary of the seven types themselves. The seven types spring from different emphases of meaning (e.g. as an effect of rhythm) via increasingly incompatible meanings to cases where “the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind” (225, emphasis mine). One may thus

2 “The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts them together; [. . .] It is for such reasons as this that poetry can be more compact, while seeming to be less precise, than prose” (Empson 1973, 48). “The reason [. . .] that ambiguity is more elaborate in poetry than in prose, other than the fact that the reader is trained to expect it, seems to be that the presence of metre and rhyme, admittedly irrelevant to the straightforward process of conveying a statement, makes it seem sensible to diverge from the colloquial order of statement, and so imply several colloquial orders from which the statement has diverged” (50).

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say that the “increase of logical disorder”,3 which governs the scale, also denotes an increase of dissonance between the different meanings implied by one and the same form.4 Empson emphasises that the (different degrees of) dissonance or competition between meanings, which characterise ambiguity, have a counterpart or complement: the unity, coherence or closure that holds the ambiguous constituents together: “anything (phrase, sentence, poem) meant to be considered as a unit must be unitary, must stand for a single order of the mind” (271). A kind of synthesis counterbalances the “multiplicity of associations” (271) insofar as “there must be ‘forces’ holding its [i.e. ambiguity’s] elements together” (271) – forces that “are essential to the totality of a poem, and that [. . .] cannot be discussed in terms of ambiguity, because they are complementary to it” (272). Although these unifying forces are idiosyncratic and peculiar to each poem, they arise from a more universal requirement according to which the specific situation depicted by the poem – the poem’s reference – demands ambiguity as a means of conveying the complexity of the situation effectively.5 “An ambiguity, then, is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, considered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar requirements of the situation” (272). This necessity of ambiguity is what, for Empson, not only guarantees its unity and coherence, but also its beauty (in terms of the compactness and compression it creates, see 44, 48, 190, 272). In Empson’s approach, ambiguity, unity, coherence, compression or compactness, beauty and poetry (I would even dare to say: literariness) are thus intricately connected.

3 Besides the degree of logical disorder, Empson (1973, 69) identifies two further dimensions that underlie his seven-types model, namely the degree of psychological complexity and the degree of consciousness of the ambiguity under consideration (crucial for the distinction between the third and fourth and between the sixth and seventh types of ambiguity, see Empson 1973, 146, 160, 224). 4 Empson emphasises the lack of a 1:1 correspondence between form and function: “there are fewer verbal devices [. . .] than there are sorts of feeling to convey by them; this gives an inherent opportunity for ambiguity which is regularly exploited” (49–50). 5 “In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected (in so far, one is tempted to say, as the same thing could not have been said so effectively without it, but, of course, in poetry the same thing could never have been said in any other way). It is not be respected in so far as it is due to its weakness or thinness of thought, obscures the matter in hand unnecessarily (without furthering such incidental purposes as we have considered) or, when the interest of the passage is not focussed upon it, so that it is merely an opportunism in the handling of material, if the reader will not easily understand the ideas which are being shuffled, and will be given a general impression of incoherence” (Empson 1973, 190).

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Tsur’s theory of cognitive poetics overlaps in several aspects with Empson’s theory of ambiguity. His analysis of the expression “dapple-dawn-drawn falcon”, drawn from a poem by Hopkins, for example, can be aligned with Empson’s second type of ambiguity (which occurs, inter alia, “when two or more meanings are resolved onto one” (69), with “pleasure” arising from “the act of working out”, 79). Tsur contends that the importance of the expression “lies not so much in the enrichment of its meaning, but in what it does to meaning”: its “various meanings blur each other or, using Bergson’s word, ‘extend into each other’” (2012, 120). On a more general level, both Empson and Tsur do thus claim that ambiguities represent, for the cognition of the reader, a kind of “fruitful disorder” (Empson 1973, 204). Empson considers, for example, a case where two satements [sic] are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relation for himself. The reason why these facts should have been selected for a poem is left for him to invent; he will invent a variety of reasons and order them in his own mind. This, I think, is the essential fact about the poetical use of language. (Empson 1973, 44–45)

Empson thus bases his understanding of poetical ambiguity on creative readerly acts of connecting and ordering the information given by a poem. Tsur goes one step further by making these cognitive acts or processes of the reader, which precede closure, a core aspect of literary criticism. He thereby performs a slight shift from textual to interpretative ambiguity (although the two are connected in the act of literary reception anyway). Drawing on John Keats’ idea of negative capability – i.e. a man’s capacity “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (quoted in Tsur 2008, 511), Tsur claims not only that “various works of literature may be ranked as demanding various degrees of negative capability” (2008, 511), but also that “implied critics” – the receptive counterpart of the implied author – differ as to whether they tend towards negative capability or towards “certitude” (2008, 514), also called “positivism” versus “factualism” (2008, 511). What is at stake here is the implied critics’ “greater or lesser tolerance of uncertainty and ignorance” (2008, 527) as it manifests itself in interpretations.6 Tsur’s point is not that interpretations should

6 As Tsur notes, “[i]nclination toward rapid or delayed closure (or categorization) is determined, to a considerable extent, by a person’s personality or cognitive style. But in academic activities it may also be influenced by the conceptual apparatus and mental sets acquired at a particular academic institution or through a particular disciplinary school. Strategies of delayed categorization may be threatening for some rigid people who, in extreme instances, may resist acquiring them” (Tsur 2012, 244).

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offer no hypotheses or that they should come to neither conclusion nor closure – as he puts it, “it would be foolish not to expect a theoretical discussion or literary interpretation to dispel ignorance” (2008, 524). His point is, rather, that the competence of a literary critic depends to a large extent on her/his capacity of delaying closure,7 that is, on his/her “readiness to change [mental] sets”,8 to approach the text from several different perspectives and to negotiate between interpretative possibilities “until one understands what the whole means” (516). Tsur thus bases his conception of adequate literary criticism on the capacity of enduring interpretative ambiguity, of tolerating the co-presence of competing interpretative solutions to a literary (textual) problem (or ambiguity), of delaying closure and thus of enduring the stage of coherence in progress (see section 3.2). Tsur thus draws on ambiguity both as a textual and as a cognitive phenomenon. Texts can blur various meanings and it is up to the reader to cognitively maintain such ambiguities temporarily. Ambiguity can thus be said to oscillate between the literary-textual and the interpretative-cognitive pole. This oscillation between two opposing poles has been pointed out clearly by Otty and Roberts. The authors identify two oppositions that contribute to the ambiguity of the term ambiguity: There are two fault lines in the use of the term ‘ambiguity’. One is between ambiguity as a property of an object (a poem, image, sentence, etc.) and as a feature of the observer’s response or psychological process. The other is between ambiguity as referring to multiple meanings per se, and confined to cases where the choice between meanings is uncertain or indeterminate. (Otty and Roberts 2013, 42–43)

The first opposition – ambiguity as a textual versus cognitive phenomenon – touches on the problem of localisation, which I have already shown to be crucial for other critical terms as well (namely for narrativity, coherence and literariness). Is ambiguity found in the text or in the reader? It seems to me that

7 “What Keats gives us in these words [i.e. in the “uncertainties”, “mysteries” and “doubts” of negative capability, ESW] is a masterful description of what psychologists of ‘perception and personality’ call delayed closure. Closure happens, for instance, when the scientist reaches his conclusion, thus dispelling ignorance regarding a particular matter of study. Now one major difference between scientific and literary thinking concerns rapidity of closure. While science, in general, is characterized by rapid closure, as opposed to the exercise of literary criticism, it remains nevertheless true that any fruitful inquiry presupposes some degree or other of delayed closure” (Tsur 2008, 514). It should be noted, in this context, that Empson equally draws on the opposition between science and literature: he distinguishes between scientific language, oriented towards clarity, and the ambiguity of non-scientific (especially poetic) language (see Empson 1973, 273). 8 “Set” being understood as “the readiness to respond in a certain way” (Tsur 2008, 524).

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the second opposition is, however, not as dichotomic as the authors suggest. The difference between “multiple meanings” and the “uncertain choice between meanings” points to the scalar dimension of ambiguity, which has been highlighted by Empson, namely to the lower or higher degree of dissonance between the meanings of an ambiguity.9 Otty and Roberts provide a survey on former accounts of ambiguity in literary theory and position themselves within the debate with two arguments. On the one hand, they advocate a shift from a “relatively passive process of aesthesis”, according to which ambiguity is in the semiotic object, “to one in which ambiguity plays a role in an active, generative process of poiesis”, according to which ambiguity is a creative, interpretative, cognitive process (2013, 37). As indicated above, their making a case for such a shift is puzzling inasmuch as Empson’s much earlier account of ambiguity already highlights the creative – or “poietic” – dimension of ambiguity. On the other hand, Otty and Roberts argue against Tsur’s ideas of delayed closure and of “literary” ambiguity. They make a case for a blending-theoretical (i.e. cognitive instead of literary) conception of ambiguity. The authors propose that “Tsur’s conception of literary ambiguity as constituting a form of delay or dissonance [. . .] can be re-imagined as a kind of synthetic power” (52). They understand this “synthetic power” as a cognitive (blending) mechanism of conceptual integration, which enables people to cope creatively with multiple significations. They also emphasise ambiguity’s “dynamic oscillation between multiplicity and unity” (51), its way of triggering negotiations between different meanings (53). Otty’s and Robert’s claims are problematic in three regards. First of all, by arguing for a reconceptualisation of ambiguity in terms of an oscillation or negotiation between ambiguity’s multiple meanings and its unity, the authors kick at an open door: as explained above, both Empson and Tsur present elaborate thoughts on the interplay of unity and multiplicity, of coherence and (degrees of) dissonance, or of closure and its delay, considering ambiguity to reside in the negotiations that take place between the two (complementary!)10 terms of this opposition. It seems as if Otty and Roberts fail to see that Tsur conceptualises these negotiations in temporal terms by associating unity with final closure and

9 What is interesting, though, is how the authors connect the terms of the first opposition with two further dichotomies. On the one hand, they connect the ambiguity that is located in a semiotic object with aesthetis, and the cognitive or psychological ambiguity with poiesis. On the other hand, they link the ambiguous object to the idea of scientific objectivity and to the positive evaluation of scientific objectivity in the natural sciences, whilst they connect psychological ambiguity with subjectivity, which is positively valuated in the humanities. 10 See Empson (1973, 272).

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the multiplicity of interpretative alternatives with the interpretative activities that precede closure. In fact, Tsur rejects neither the creative potential of these negotiations nor closure and unity as such. Thus, Otty’s and Roberts’ arguing for a “dynamic oscillation between multiplicity and unity that drives ambiguity” misses its target. Secondly, their proposal to replace Tsur’s idea of delayed closure with a “synthetic power” reveals an inconsistency of their approach: while they argue, on the one hand, for a conceptualisation of ambiguity in terms of a negotiation between multiplicity and unity, they favour, on the other hand, one of the sides, namely the dimension of synthesis (and thus unity). Thirdly, their criticism of Tsur’s conception of literary ambiguity is not convincing. The conception that they set against Tsur’s ideas reproduces only commonplace theories of literariness. Otty and Roberts implicitly allude to theories that attempt to identify characteristics of “literary” language use, but at the same time, it is exactly the existence of such characteristics against which Otty and Roberts are arguing. Seeing ambiguity as the basis of a poetics rather than an aesthetics, as a basic mechanism of cognition rather than as a ‘special case’ confined to art, means seeing literature and arts as prompts to the active creation of meaning-making, rather than as presenting a different kind of meaning (or as disturbing meaning making). In this light, literary language is not deviant or abnormal, but rather an instance of self-reflective awareness of this fluidity. Literature then appears not as something essentially other to non-literary language, but rather as in excess of it, a kind of hyper-fluidity which makes the operations of thought visible [. . .] The ambiguity of art in this light, might be seen as double-scope blending made visible, a means of revealing thought to itself [. . .]. (Otty and Roberts 2013, 52–53, emphases mine)

If the authors declare that “literary language is not deviant or abnormal”, they allude to an earlier statement according to which “Tsur’s description of literature [. . .] is premised upon the problematic assumption that ‘rational’ language is the norm” (47). They obviously reject the assumption that literary language deviates from pre-established norms. Nonetheless, they introduce exactly such a theory of deviance from a norm or standard by characterising literature via an “excess” (excessive in comparison to what norm?) and a “hyper-fluidity” (“hyper” as compared to which standard of fluidity?). Moreover, by introducing the idea of a “self-reflective awareness”, Otty and Roberts invoke one of the most classical criterions of literariness, namely self-referentiality,11 often associated with Jakobson’s “poetic function”, understood as the “focus on the message for its own sake” (Jakobson 1988, 37). But there is a significant difference

11 See Winko (2009, 385).

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between Jakobson’s and Otty and Roberts’s ideas of self-referentiality. While Jakobson ascribes the self-reflexivity to the “message” (i.e., to the text), Otty and Roberts ascribe it to thought. The problem with this shift from text to thought is that the two terms of the communicative equation (a text referring to itself) are not identical any more if, as the authors suggest, textual structures (“literary language”) prompt readers to become aware of cognitive mechanisms. Consequently, there is no self-reflective awareness, no auto-referentiality anymore, but only referentiality. Talking about a “self-reflective” awareness is thus problematic.12 – Finally, there is little consistency in denying that ambiguity is an artful device while talking, simultaneously, about “the ambiguity of art”. If it was true that the specificity of the “ambiguity of art” consists in its making double-scope blending visible, as Otty and Roberts argue, then this specificity would distinguish art from everyday language whose double-scope blending – as Fauconnier and Turner (2002) themselves claim – mostly happens unnoticed and without any conscious effort. To summarise this research review, one can say that . . . – . . . ambiguity denotes the lack of a 1:1 correspondence between expression and meaning insofar as one and the same textual syntagm can be matched with different (more or less incompatible) meanings. Correspondingly, there is a higher or lower degree of competition between these multiple meanings. In other words, there is a simultaneity or superimposition of several meanings associated with one and the same linguistic expression. – . . . a theoretical challenge consists of the “the ambiguity of ambiguity”, emphasised both by Empson (1973, 24) and by Otty and Roberts (2013, 42–43). Empson conceives of it as a vagueness arising with the different (readerly and/or authorial) psychological states that produce ambiguity (“an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two things has been meant”, 1973, 24) or with (less subjective) textual features (“that a statement has several meanings”, 24). Otty and Roberts consider the ambiguity of ambiguity as the oscillation, in the use of the term, both between an aesthetic versus poietic conception and between meaning multiplicity and meaning incompatibility. To conclude, I would like to elaborate shortly on this last aspect, i.e. on the ability of ambiguity to denote either the existence of multiple meanings or a

12 Additionally, it is, in my eyes, highly reductive and little probable or convincing to interpret all ambiguities, as they occur in literature, as a commentary on cognitive mechanisms.

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dissonance between them.13 I propose to reformulate it as follows: While one dimension of ambiguity consists of the co-presence of two (or more) meanings (simultaneity of meanings), its other dimension works against their co-presence (competition between meanings). The ambiguity of ambiguity can therefore be said to consist (inter alia) of the fact that the expression “ambiguity” has two meanings, one being the simultaneity of meanings, the other the competition between meanings (see Figure 8).14

Figure 8: Non-ambiguousness (left side) versus ambiguity (right side).

4.1.2 Narrative ambiguity: Towards a framework of analysis The narratological approaches that I will summarise in the next sections correspond to the basic structure of ambiguity, pointed out in the last subchapter, but they are centred upon narrativity. That is, they describe phenomena according to which narrative syntagms create several (more or less) competing narrative meanings, ideas or structures that coexist simultaneously. In order to be able to cover, in the subsequent survey, various narratological models that deal with ambiguity, however, I need to make some theoretical adjustments.

13 This aspect is closely related to the much-debated tension between ambiguity’s unity versus multiplicity: the higher the degree of dissonance, the more the unity of the ambiguous expression is threatened; conversely, the lower the degree of dissonance, the more the unity of the ambiguous expression is preserved. 14 One could argue against the ambiguity of ambiguity by claiming that simultaneity and competition are facets (i.e. partial meanings) of ambiguity rather than simultaneous or competing meanings. But, as we will see below, forms of ambiguity differ from each other in terms of these two meanings, some ambiguity concepts being based primarily on simultaneity, others rather on competition.

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The first adjustment concerns the definition of the textual basis of ambiguity. The multiple competing meanings analysed by narratologists do not always arise from one and the same linguistic syntagm – for example, from a particular sentence, as in linguistics –, but sometimes also from different segments of one and the same narrative. Although this seems to run contrary to our basic definition of ambiguity, according to which one and the same linguistic expression has different meanings, I propose that these narratological approaches can deal with ambiguity as well, for it all depends on how one defines (delimits) the linguistic expression under consideration; besides partial narrative segments, also narratives in their entirety (even a whole novel) can be considered as a long linguistic expression whose meaning(s) can be ambiguous. The second adjustment concerns the nature of the multiplicity and competition that is at the core of ambiguity. In order to narrow down the definition of ambiguity so that it applies specifically to narrativity, I propose to replace the idea of a multiplicity of meanings, which is a quite general and vague concept and difficult to handle as an instrument of concrete analysis, by a framework that works with established narratological categories. Most narrative theorists would agree, I think, that the text as a whole cues readers to erect a variety of cognitive-narrative structures (viewpoints, characters, events, etc.), which jointly constitute the gestalt (i.e. the situation model) of the narrative. Considered from this narratological angle, ambiguity can occur whenever the overall narrative syntagm creates two (or more) structures that compete for making the same structural contribution to the narrative configuration. When I say “the same structural contribution”, I mean that only structural elements of the same kind can compete one with the other. What do I mean when I say that they are “of the same kind”? I mean that they have to pertain to the same out of several main categories (or subcategories) of narrative analysis, such as space, time, character, event, voice or focalisation. Think, for example, of the incipit of Kafka’s Castle: it is ambiguous insofar as there is a debate on whether this passage manifests the internal focalisation of K. or the zero focalisation of a narrator (see Kudszus 1964; Miller 1991; concerning the term focalisation, see Genette 1980, 188–189). Thus, one and the same expression (the incipit) creates two kinds of focalisation,15 which compete with each other to constitute the perspectival structure of the incipit, i.e. to constitute an important element of the particular narrativity of the novel. This example also shows that categories of narrative analysis can contain several (levels of)

15 That is, two structures that can be considered as “narrative” according to their prominence as narratological categories.

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subcategories. Using this framework, we can thus provisionally assume that narrative ambiguity occurs when the same category of narrative analysis applies more than once to the same textual syntagm. A problem arises, however, with what I wrote above about the ambiguity of ambiguity. Ambiguity denotes either a co-presence or a competition between implied meanings. If narrative ambiguity concerns cases where a narrative syntagm creates two (or more) structures that compete for providing the same category of analysis, we need to clarify in which cases there is competition and when there is only a non-competitive co-presence. I contend that the solution for this problem can be found in the question of how one conceptualises a narrative. Consider, for example, character as a narrative category of analysis. If a narrative presents more than one character, this does not mean that there is narrative ambiguity, precisely because narratives, as a rule, have conceptual slots for more than one character. Free indirect speech, on the contrary, is a (structurally) ambiguous phenomenon insofar as narratives, at least according to a certain default schema of narrative,16 do not have enough conceptual slots for two voices to speak simultaneously (the voices of both a narrator and a character).17 It can thus be considered to be an ambiguous phenomenon insofar as the category of analysis voice applies more than once (and more often than a specific default schema of narrative allows) to one and the same textual syntagm. The third adjustment concerns terminology. It seems to me that some differentiations are necessary, which should allow for a more precise description of the interplay of the aspects mentioned above. I would therefore like to introduce four terminological labels. (i) The (generic) schema of ‘narrative’: This label highlights the cognitive nature of narrative as a generic schema, i.e. the fact that it is a conceptual construct that can vary from individual to individual. I have to admit, however, that working with this generic category is problematic, albeit indispensable. 16 See, for instance, Phelan and Rabinowitz’s “skeletal [default] definition” of narrative: “Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Herman et al. 2012, 3). 17 Of course, here the historical dimension of conceptualisations of narrative (that is, processes of ‘naturalisation’ or ‘narrativisation’, see Fludernik 1996) comes into play. Insofar as ‘free indirect speech’ is today a well-known narrative strategy, it is not deviant any more. I do nonetheless classify the phenomenon as structurally ambiguous because it runs contrary (i) to natural human capacities – humans are not able to speak with two voices at once –, (ii) to the (“natural”) schema structures based on these capacities and (iii) to default definitions of narrative (see below).

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The problem that arises here has been addressed earlier in my summary of Otty and Roberts’ criticism of Tsur’s conviction according to which poetic ambiguity can be understood as the deviation from the norm of linguistic rationality. I contend that the idea of a norm, of a default mode of communication is inherent in ambiguity, inasmuch as the latter essentially deviates from the mode of a 1:1 correspondence of expression and meaning. It is this 1:1 correspondence that can be said to represent a norm with which ambiguity contrasts. This statement should, however, not be misunderstood as a hypothesis according to which “ordinary” language – whatever that is – always functions according to the 1:1 scheme. My claim of the existence of a norm only makes explicit the impression, put forward by all the theoretical accounts of ambiguity discussed above, that ambiguity lives by a certain kind of deviance. Consider the labels used to describe ambiguity, such as compactness, compression, multiplicity, indeterminacy, delayed closure, or hyperfluidity. All of them can indeed be understood as attempts to pin down specific forms of deviance, since the common denominator of the various terms consists of the idea that ambiguity is a special, somehow deviant phenomenon. In ambiguous expressions, meaning is more compressed, more diversified, more indeterminate, kept more open or more fluid than . . . However one finishes this comparative sentence, there is no doubt that comparison – and thus deviance – is an essential characteristic of ambiguity. Moreover, deviance always presupposes the idea of a norm, of something it deviates from. It would not make much sense to give, for my part, a definition of this norm, simply because theoretical approaches to ambiguity differ in what constitutes the implicit norm against which each ambiguity under consideration stands. Thus, instead of filling this norm semantically, I prefer to simply state that it does obviously exist, forming a background of expectation as to how language (and the transmission of meaning) “normally” functions. Any attempt to pin down, on a general level, the nature of narrative ambiguity has to come to terms with the same question: What is the norm against which narrative ambiguity stands out? Supposedly, there is no single norm either, but rather various idiosyncratic norms, which can be derived individually from each narratological account of ambiguity. This is why I work with the generic schema of narrative: it allows me to imply the reference to a norm – a default expectation and concept of what constitutes a narrative or of how a narrative is made –, but it allows me simultaneously to cover the differences between the norms (i.e., between the conceptual apparatuses) of various individuals (that is, of particular readers and/or researchers). However, in order to be able to analyse forms of narrative ambiguity, it is indispensable to operate at least provisionally with a specific, explicit formulation

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of an underlying norm, of a generic schema. This has, unfortunately, the disadvantage of simplifying the matter too much, inasmuch as, in reality, there are perhaps as many generic schemas as readers. Nonetheless, working with a concrete, exemplary norm is indispensable for understanding the mechanism behind narrative ambiguities. Such a norm has been formulated by Phelan and Rabinowitz in their “skeletal definition” of narrative, which seems well suited both to express what many individual (normative) schemas of ‘narrative’ have in common and to represent the norm with which (models of) forms of ambiguity contrast: “Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Herman et al. 2012, 3). Using this skeletal definition does not mean that I agree with it, or conceive of narrativity as being grasped by this definition. Quite the contrary: if narrative ambiguities deviate from this definition in various ways, they expand the notion of narrativity by transgressing the borders of such a narrative norm.18 (ii) Narrative paradigms of structure: As the skeletal definition of Phelan and Rabinowitz suggests, any generic schema of narrative is constituted by parts that, together, form a normative, individual narrative gestalt. These parts can be understood as “conceptual slots” of the generic schema narrative, which are expected to be filled in in the course of narration. In Phelan and Rabinowitz’ definition quoted above, for example, the first “somebody” alludes to the conceptual slot of a ‘narrator’, the second to that of a ‘narratee’ (or an audience/a reader) and “something happened” to ‘events’, ‘eventfulness’ and/ or ‘plot’. These conceptual slots are structural components of a narrative and therefore also categories of (narratological) analysis. Some conceptual slots are highlighted by each normative, generic definition, others are concealed. Perspectival issues (i.e., categories of analysis such as focalisation, viewpoint, etc.), for example, are not highlighted by the definition quoted above. From now on, I will refer to any such structural categories of analysis, implied by generic schemata of narrative (such as focalisation, character, story or discourse) as narrative paradigms of structure. In this connection, two questions should be addressed: Firstly, what is the added value of working with this concept? And secondly, why do I use the term

18 By working with other norms, one could expand the notion of narrativity in other ways. Richardson, for instance, concentrates, in Unnatural Voices, on some specific normative dimensions of the (or a) schema of narrative, for example the separation of (intradiegetic, extradiegetic and literary) “communication levels”. He shows how narratives deviate from this schema, concluding that these levels “are inherently permeable, and [ . . . .] can be collapsed” (2006, 132).

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paradigm? As to the first question, working with this notion allows me to identify ways by which narratives create the forms of co-presence and competition that constitute ambiguity. As I have explained above, competition can only occur if at least two structures of the same kind are created by the narrative, both susceptible of making a contribution to the narrative gestalt. Narrative paradigms of structure are the categories that define in which ways competing narrative items are “of the same kind”. As to the second question, I would like to highlight the fact that a paradigm, understood as a class or category that can be abstracted from a syntagmatic textual configuration by means of analysis, contains a number of elements that are similar in a certain regard, this regard being substantial to the existence of the paradigm. In linguistics, the predicate, for example, is a syntactical paradigm, which can contain a broad variety of different elements (“slept”, “cry”, “laughs”); these elements are similar, however, in that they serve a similar syntactical function. Establishing an analogy between linguistics and narratology, I would like to argue that, just as phrase constituents (such as “subject”, “object” or “predicate”) are categories of linguistic analysis and structural paradigms of the sentence whose combination constitutes a sentential syntagm, narrative constituents such as “event”, “viewpoint” or “character” are categories of narratological analysis and structural paradigms, which jointly create narrative syntagms. Like syntactic paradigms, narrative paradigms of structure contain a number of different elements. A narrative can present, for example, a number of different (kinds of) characters or various (kinds of) events or focalisations. Working with the term “paradigm” allows for an analytical look at narrative configurations in terms of classes of structure and allows for an analysis of the interplay of similarity and difference19 within them. This interplay of similarity and contrast is crucial for an understanding of ambiguity20 insofar as (i) the impression of (ambiguous) co-presence can only be explained in terms of the paradigmatic similarity of structures (i.e., their being grouped in the same category of analysis) and insofar as (ii) the impression of (ambiguous) competition derives from the difference or even opposition between structures within the same paradigm of structure, such oppositions making of the paradigmatic an axis of selection.

19 According to Lotman, the simultaneity of similarity and contrast is peculiar to the paradigmatic inasmuch as the latter is characterised by “that equivalence which arises on the basis of a relation of incomplete equality; it occurs where there is a level (or levels) on which elements are equal and a level (or levels) on which they are not equal” (1977, 80, emphasis mine). 20 In this connection, one may think of Empson’s (1973) scale of types of ambiguity, ordered according to a growing difference or dissonance between implied meanings.

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(iii) Narratological frames: Narrative paradigms of structure can be constituted by several levels of subcategorisation, depending on the theoretical approach under consideration. Internal or zero focalisation, for example, are subcategories of the structural paradigm of focalisation (see Genette 1980, 189), while cardinal functions and catalyses are subcategories of the event paradigm (see Barthes 1975, 248).21 I shall refer to such narratological subcategories as narratological frames, thereby highlighting the fact that they are (i) technical terms, (ii) conceptual representations and (iii) elements of one and the same paradigm of structure. As we will see in the next sections, narratological frames are important for the analysis of ambiguity because ambiguity can occur when narratological frames (e.g. different character-viewpoints) compete for structuring a narrative segment. (In cases where subcategorisation does not play a role for the analysis, the terms 2 and 3 can be used interchangeably.) (iv) Narrative frames: Finally, the term narrative frame(s) refers to specific textual-conceptual correlates of paradigms of structure or of narratological frames, that is, to structurally important content conveyed by narratives. For example, a specific case of focalisation as it occurs in a specific part of a novel represents a narrative focalisation frame. My concept of a narrative frame is akin to Dancygier’s (2012b) concept of a narrative space in that the two refer to specific textual-cognitive givens. The difference, however, consists of the fact that a narrative space covers many aspects of analysis simultaneously (time, space, narrator and diegetic contents), while a narrative frame is more of an abstraction: it covers only one aspect at once (specific character frames, event frames, focalisation frames, and so on). If narratological frames are the types, narrative frames are the tokens. The former enables the identification of the latter, serving as a conceptual grid. I do not include every type of conceptual schema that may be activated by a narrative (such as betrayal, love, secretary, etc.) into the category of a narrative frame. Although such schemata play, of course, a crucial role for the narrativity of literary texts, and thus also for narrative dynamics, they are not linked to narratological categories of analysis. Therefore, I will refer to them simply as cognitive schemata. Ryan’s “narrative functions”, however, which will be discussed below, bridge the gap between cognitive schemata and narrative frames, in that they point to the structural significance that specific cognitive schemata, activated by the narrative, have for the development of the plot.

21 A variety of further examples of subcategorisations exist. I am restricting myself here to establishing the framework of my analysis, without going into every detail.

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In light of these terminological considerations and propositions, the initial understanding of narrative ambiguity should be refined. Ambiguity occurs not when a narrative paradigm of structure (e.g. focalisation) can be argued to apply more than once to one and the same textual syntagm, but when it can be argued to apply more often to the same textual syntagm than a particular (generic) schema of ‘narrative’ gives reason to expect. Working with such a generic norm opens analyses of narrative ambiguity to debates on whether the schema of ‘narrative’, used as the basis of comparison, is well chosen, adequate or functional at all. But it also allows us, in our own analyses of ambiguity, to pin down the exact nature of the ambiguity under consideration and can help us to make explicit the norm against which the alleged ambiguity stands out. This can contribute to a heightened awareness of our own implicit assumptions and incite us to be more thoughtful about them.

4.1.3 Ambiguity in narratology I: Plot-related approaches The first narratological approach that is crucial in terms of this ambiguity is Prince’s concept of the disnarrated, which denotes “all the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (Prince 1988, 2), that is, “terms, phrases, and passages that consider what did not or does not take place [. . .] whether they pertain to the narrator and his or her narration [. . .] or to one of the characters and his or her actions” (3). Since events constitute the fabula – which is one of the crucial narrative paradigms of structure –, the disnarrated can be said to describe an ambiguity that is related to the story as a narrative paradigm of structure. (Diegetically) factual and counterfactual events coexist within such narratives and compete to fill the event slots of the fictionally factual plot line. However, not all instances of the disnarrated are related to ambiguity, but only those counterfactual events that represent alternatives to (diegetically) factual events. For example, if the protagonist of a novel has a dream that is not relevant for the plot at all, then there is no ambiguity – only, as one could say with respect to Dancygier’s terminology, a further embedded narrative “dream” space (which may, for instance, serve the characterisation of the protagonist). If, on the contrary, the protagonist mentally goes through different alternatives on how to act in an imminent situation, crucial for further plot development, then the different event possibilities compete with each other, in an anticipatory manner, in order to fill the next event slot in the plot chain. Before the narrative actualises one of these possibilities, all the possible events are activated. There is thus a copresence and competition between several narrative event frames, activated by the

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narrative syntagm. Baroni describes, in the context of his “poétique de la discordance narrative” (2009, 20, orig. emphasis deleted), event alternatives as a form of “density”22 – a metaphor that is significant in terms of ambiguity and narrative projection (as we shall see further below).

Figure 9: Event ambiguity.

The generic norm against which plot ambiguity stands out consists of a single, fictionally factual plot chain, which allows for the realisation of only one of several possible events. Analytically speaking, the narrative syntagm activates more narrative event frames that pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure than a particular (generic) schema of ‘narrative’, based on a single plot line, gives reason to expect. In other words, the disnarrated events overfill the single empty event slot of the fictionally “factual” plot line,23 thereby 22 “[. . .] le plaisir de la narration réside dans la défiguration (provisoire ou définitive) de l’histoire, ce qui permet d’en éprouver la profondeur temporelle: c’est, par exemple, l’originalité d’un projet, et le risque d’échouer dans son actualisation, qui confèrent son épaisseur au futur en ouvrant des alternatives, des potentialités inédites qui sont autant de catalyseurs pour l’interprétation et pour l’émotion” (Baroni 2009, 12). 23 It has to be noted, however, that the norm of a single, fictionally factual plot line has, of course, been questioned (and transgressed) by various narratives, and that not only in the domain of modern or postmodern literature. Already Diderot plays with this norm, offering plot alternatives in Jacques le fataliste. Also cinematic narratives present ontologically competing events and plot lines, for example Sliding Doors (1998), directed by Peter Howitt.

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creating an ambiguous indeterminacy (see Figure 9). When concerning indeterminacy, one should consider Lotman’s following reflection. Indeterminacy is the measure of information. Minimal information is contained in the choice between two equally probable possibilities. As the reserve of indeterminacy becomes exhausted the degree of information drops, falling to zero at the moment when it becomes entirely redundant, i.e. totally predictable. (Lotman 2001, 227)

Such an indeterminacy, due to two equally probable possibilities, lies equally at the heart of Bremond’s (1966) “logique des possibles narratifs” (“logic of narrative possibilities”, 1980) according to which the so-called “elementary [narrative] sequence” (1980, 387) lives by branching alternatives on the level of plot. Inasmuch as readers weigh these alternatives during their reading processes, the alternatives represent, as Ricœur puts it, a “progressive contingency”, while they would appear, from the point of view of a reader who is already familiar with the whole plot development, as a “retroactive necessity” (see Ricœur 1985, 39). What lies behind the distinction between “progressive contingency” and “retroactive necessity” are two different reader concepts: “progressive contingency” implies a reader in the act of reading, while “retroactive necessity” is based on a reader who has finished the reading process and considers the narrative gestalt in retrospect. This is a crucial difference, which underlies not only my distinction between coherence in progress and resultative coherence, but also a variety of further theoretical approaches.24 An approach that is crucial in terms of narrative ambiguity on the story level – and that can be related to the theoretical models of Prince and Bremond – is Ryan’s (1991) analysis of plot networks, constituted by actual events (actual sequence), virtual events (possible events, wished, foreseen or feared by characters) and virtual embedded narratives25 (possible sequences of events imagined

24 Baroni (2009), for instance, bases his poetics of narrative discordance on the same distinction: “On peut, en gros, opposer une conception de l’intrigue ancrée dans le phénomène de la lecture à une saisie rétrospective et totalisante de celle-ci. Dans le déjà-lu, l’intrigue tend à se réduire à une figure, à une configuration rendant l’histoire sensée, certes, mais dans laquelle se perdent sa force et sa valeur esthétique. Les schémas posent une concordance qui déchronologise la temporalité et qui pétrifie les œuvres, alors que les incertitudes qui grèvent ces schémas mettent en lumière une discordance qui se déploie dans la durée d’une histoire inachevée mais vivante, une histoire qui a encore le potentiel de nous affecter, de nous transformer” (Baroni 2009, 16, orig. emphasis). 25 Her approach to plot virtuality is summarised in greater detail in my chapter on Toussaint in the context of tellability (section 6.2).

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by characters, that is, intents and “passive projections”26). For example, in the story of Cinderella, actual events are the invitation of Cinderella and her stepsisters to the Prince’s ball, the apparition of the Fairy Godmother to Cinderella and Cinderella’s loss of her shoe; virtual events are the Prince dancing with Cinderella’s stepsisters (intended by the mother), Cinderella’s eternal disappearance (feared by the Prince) or the shoe fitting on one of the stepsisters (wished by the stepsisters and their mother); an example for a virtual embedded narrative are Cinderella’s ideas about the ball: that she will go to the ball with her stepmother and stepsisters, that she will dance there with the Prince, that the Prince will fall in love with her, etc. (see Ryan 1991, 160–161). All the actual and virtual events and virtual embedded narratives constitute jointly a complex plot network where the fictionally factual plot development is enriched by a range of character-specific plot virtualities. As Ryan herself emphasises, her theory overlaps, on the one hand, with Prince’s disnarrated. Like Prince, Ryan theorises counterfactual (i.e., virtual) events, presented by the narrative text, but she narrows her theory down to the story level, including only those outlines of unrealised possibilities that are imagined by characters (and not by narrators, see Ryan 1991, 167–168). Additionally, her model concentrates more on the plot as a whole and less on isolated events. It seems to me that she shares, on the other hand, Bremond’s focus on plot virtuality. Both Bremond and Ryan emphasise the complexity that arises with the ramification of the plot and conceptualise plot virtuality as a narrative network. Bremond calls it “un réseau narratif” [a narrative web] (Bremond 1966, 62) and Ryan illustrates her analysis by plot maps that form a web of interconnected (diegetically) factual and fictive events (see Ryan 1991, 160). It is difficult to determine whether Ryan’s model of plot complexity is based on the imagination of a reader in the act of reading (in terms of “progressive contingency”) or on a reader who has finished the reading process (in terms of “retroactive necessity”). In fact, her model seems to combine the two theoretical standpoints. The sequentiality that inheres in the horizontal direction of her plot-network ramifications testifies to the idea of progressive contingency, while the plot network as an overview on all possible and realised actions is based upon retrospection. That Ryan’s model combines the idea of “progressive contingency” and of “retroactive necessity” may be supported by her theoretical claims. On the one hand, Ryan argues that plot complexity (the 26 “Passive projections” are “constructed through forward logic: the individual assesses the present situation and computes the most probable developments. If a probable development leads to the solution of her problem she can settle for a passive move. If not, she must construct an alternative to the passive projection” (Ryan 1991, 135).

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Figure 10: Plot ambiguity in terms of counterfactuality/virtuality (simplified: punctual divergence of plot lines).

“diversification of the narrative universe”, which develops with the “variety of alternate possible worlds”, see Ryan 1991, 156) is responsible for tellability; the interest of the reader grows as s/he progressively explores the network of counterfactual events, plans and projections that enrich the factual plot line with a background of potentialities. On the other hand, as she considers the complexity of the entire plot network in retrospect, Ryan constructs of this diversification on the plot level a “principle of tellability”, encapsulated in the imperative “seek the diversification of possible worlds in the narrative universe” (Ryan 1991, 156). Just as the identification of any law, the establishment of such a “principle” gives her model a touch of necessity, dependent on retrospective analysis.27 Ryan’s idea of linking plot virtuality with tellability is consistent with Prince’s claim according to which “the disnarrated provides one of the important means for emphasizing tellability: this narrative is worth narrating because

27 Ryan notes that narratives do not always comply with the “principle of diversification”. She assumes that other principles of tellability can contribute to the tellability of the narrative (see Ryan 1991, 159).

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it could have been otherwise, because it usually is otherwise, because it was not otherwise” (Prince 1988, 5, his emphasis). However, while Prince associates the disnarrated with tellability, he denies it any narrativity: “the disnarrated is clearly not essential to narrative”, since “the hallmark of narrative is assurance. Narrative, which is etymologically linked to knowledge, lives in certainty” (Prince 1988, 4). This view is not shared, for example, by Dannenberg (2008), who links narrative counterfactuality with narrativity. Analysing both “plots of counterfactuality”28 and “plots of coincidence”,29 Dannenberg considers these “two major plot patterns” as “excellent narrative phenomena with which to perform a transhistorical study of how the novel develops qualitative narrativity” (Dannenberg 2008, 5, emphasis mine).30 Researchers disagree on whether plot ambiguity is an intrinsically narrative phenomenon. I propose to conceive of plot ambiguity as a dimension of narrativity by analysing it as a narrative dynamic that consists of negotiations between textual features (a textual syntagm) and cognitive frames and schemata (namely narrative event and plot frames; event and plot represent narrative paradigms of structure and the activated generic schema of ‘narrative’ consists of a single, fictionally factual plot line). Ryan (1991) invokes a further kind of narrative ambiguity, which is related to tellability, labelled functional polyvalence: “Narrative highlights are formed by events entering into several distinct functional units. By functional unit I mean a grouping of states and events [. . .] presenting special strategic significance for the story as a whole. This strategic significance is captured by a label, such as retaliation, reward, deceit, test, challenge, or betrayal” (Ryan 1991, 155). The ambiguity of functional polyvalence consists of the fact that several narrative functions are mapped onto one and the same event. Narrative functions are rooted in specific cognitive schemata, activated by the narrative. These schemata either structure the plot or make another kind of crucial contribution to the story coherence. Ryan gives the example of Oedipus Rex: “the marriage of Oedipus to Jocasta [= a specific event, ESW] complicates the plot by functioning simultaneously as the satisfaction of a desire, as the fulfilment of a prediction, as the violation of an

28 That is, “plots of divergence” according to which narrative paths bifurcate or branch out (see Dannenberg 2008, 2). 29 That is, “plots of convergence” according to which narrative paths intersect (see Dannenberg 2008, 2). 30 By distinguishing between “convergent” and “divergent” (counterfactual) plots, Dannenberg establishes two narratological frames that pertain to the narrative paradigm of structure “plot”. Considered from this angle, the divergent plot frame displays the ambiguity that arises with the competition of events for supplying the linear plot structure.

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interdiction, and, through this violation, as ground for punishment [= narrative functions, ESW]” (Ryan 2005b, 590). Ryan’s concept thus describes the reader’s insight into the ambiguous significance that an event has for the whole narrative gestalt insofar as the respective event (e.g., the marriage) simultaneously participates in – and therefore cross-connects – the most important narrative schemata and spaces of the story configuration.31 Using Dancygier’s (2012b) theoretical framework, one could say that the different narrative functions, which are mapped onto one and the same event (e.g. onto Oedipus’ marriage), originate in various “narrative spaces” (and thus in different segments of the narrative text, which can correspond to a wide temporal gap between the diegetic events of a plot line). Ryan’s functional polyvalence thus describes a form of ‘coherence in progress’ by which various narrative spaces – including the conceptual schemata activated by them – become conceptually integrated by a specific event.

Figure 11: The ambiguity of functional polyvalence (simplified).

The norm against which functional polyvalence stands out is a generic schema of ‘narrative’ according to which each story event assumes one narrative function (i.e., according to which there is a 1:1 correspondence between narrative events and functions).32 Functional polyvalence denotes thus a dynamics according to which the single conceptual “function” slot, inherent in the “event” slot of the generic schema narrative, is overfilled by several narrative functions, i.e. by several cognitive schemata that are peculiar to other narrative spaces. To put it more simply, functional polyvalence occurs when a narrative event frame

31 This is why the functionally polyvalent and in this regard ambiguous event makes a significant contribution to the final, resultative coherence of the story. 32 A narrative that would correspond to this norm would be governed by a “syntagmatic” kind of narrativity, one event-function unit following the preceding. A narrative that displays functional polyvalence, by contrast, represents rather a “paradigmatic” type of narrativity (see Warning 2001 and my summary of his model in chapter 2).

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cues the activation of more narrative function frames than the generic schema gives reason to expect.

4.1.4 Ambiguity in narratology II: The levels of discourse and textuality So far, the theories taken into consideration were mainly concerned with the plot, that is, with the story level. Narrative ambiguity can, however, also concern the discourse level or, respectively, the level of presentation of the discourse.33 I would therefore like to draw briefly on Uri Margolin’s (2014) article on simultaneity in narrative. His article is mainly concerned with the simultaneity of intradiegetic actions (i.e. the fact that events are “isochronous or occupy exactly the same temporal interval”, see Margolin 2014, 777), which, for itself, is not of interest for my research on ambiguity since simultaneous events do not necessarily compete with each other: default generic schemata of ‘narrative’ allow for the depiction of a diegetic universe where many things happen at the same time at different places. As a literary example, consider the protagonist of Toussaint’s Faire l’amour, who makes love to a woman exactly at the same time during which his ex-girlfriend Marie makes love to her new lover. This fact alone does not produce any ambiguity.34 What, on the contrary, is of interest with regard to ambiguity is the third of three manners, identified by Margolin, by which “simultaneous narrated acts, or acts of narration for that matter” (778) can be represented. Besides “alternating block presentations” and “repeated intercutting [. . .] between two or more simultaneous narrated actions or acts of narration”, Margolin describes the possibility of “[t]urning the text on the page from a one- into a two-dimensional object by splitting the page into two or more distinct rows or columns running in parallel, each representing one of the concurrent activities or acts of narration (Butor’s Niagara [. . .], Josipovici’s “Mobius the Stripper” [. . .])” (778). Can such a split discourse be considered as an instance of ambiguity? One can find two central features of ambiguity: co-presence and competition. There are two co-present textual syntagms (i.e., two text columns), which compete for constituting the linear textuality of the discourse.35

33 See Schmid’s distinction of four narrative levels (Schmid 2005, 241–243). 34 Ryan has analysed such cases where “two characters may engage simultaneously in similar action” as a form of “semantic parallelism and symmetry”, which creates tellability (see Ryan 1991, 155). 35 However, the cognitive schemata that contribute to the creation of this ambiguity do not seem to be specifically narrative-narratological ones. Rather, the competitive dimension

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Figure 12: The ambiguity of simultaneous splitpage discourse.

Ambiguity can concern narratives even beyond the level of (the presentation of) discourse, namely with regard to what Genette (1997) calls hypertextuality. For Genette, hypertextuality is one out of five kinds of transtextuality.36 Transtextuality is broadly defined as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette 1997, 1), whilst hypertextuality means “any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is

produces conventions of (and biological restrictions on) reading: readers are neither able to read nor used to reading two columns of a text simultaneously. The norm against which this kind of ambiguity stands out seems to be a schema of ‘text’ or ‘discourse’ according to which the text is constituted by a single text line, which offers itself to a linear, horizontal reading. The structural resemblance between split discourse and counterfactual “plots of divergence” is evident: just like “plots of counterfactuality” present two (or more) competing plot lines, thereby rendering the plot ambiguous, split “simultaneous” discourse projects two competing texts, which render the discourse ambiguous. However, insofar as this ambiguity contrasts with a cognitive schema of ‘text’ or ‘discourse’ rather than with a generic schema of ‘narrative’, it should less be considered as a narrative dynamic than as a textual dynamic. Nonetheless, given that narrative texts are a subset of texts, paradigms of structure of the schema of ‘text’ (such as textual linearity) can also apply to the embedded schema ‘narrative’ (all text-types bearing, by definition, features of textuality). If split-page discourse occurs in narrative texts, it can influence the text’s narrativity. 36 The other four types are intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality and architextuality (see Genette 1997, 1–5).

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grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (5, orig. emphasis). Genette focuses on forms of hypertextuality according to which a text has manifest “second-degree” qualities. This hypertext is supposed to be derived blatantly and officially from a predecessor hypotext by means of “transformation” (Joyce’s Ulysses is a hypertext, which has transformed the hypotext constituted by Homer’s Odyssey) or of “imitation” (see 9–10). Genette himself argues that hypertextuality is characterised by (degrees of) ambiguity: In every hypertext there is an ambiguity [. . .]. That ambiguity is precisely caused by the fact that a hypertext can be read both for itself and in its relation to its hypotext. Proust’s pastiche of Flaubert is a text that is ‘grammatically’ (semantically) autonomous. But at the same time, no one can claim to have exhausted its function without having perceived and enjoyed it as an imitation of Flaubert’s style. Quite evidently there are various degrees in that ambiguity: Ulysses can be read more easily without references to the Odyssey than can a pastiche without referring to its model, and there is room between these two poles for every possible gradation [. . .]. But the fact remains that it cannot be overlooked without voiding the hypertext of a significant dimension [. . .]. (Genette 1997, 397–398)

Genette then presents further characteristics of hypertextual ambiguity, which we have already repeatedly encountered in our review, namely the co-presence (i.e. simultaneity), superimposition and “dissonance” (i.e., competition) of two elements, and, as an effect of all this, an increase in complexity: [. . .] the art of ‘making new things out of old’ has the merit, at least, of generating more complex [. . .] objects than those that are ‘made on purpose’; a new function is superimposed upon and interwoven with an older structure, and the dissonance between these two concurrent elements imparts its flavor to the resulting whole. (Genette 1997, 398)

Genette characterises this ambiguity as “object duplicity”. He conceptualises the latter via the notion of the palimpsest, which applies both to the two texts (they are layered or blended) and to understanding them (namely at once, by blending them): That duplicity of the object, in the sphere of textual relations, can be represented by the old analogy of the palimpsest: on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to show through. [. . .] The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the flavor of which [. . .] may well be condensed in an adjective recently coined by Philippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading. To put it differently, [. . .] one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together. (Genette 1997, 398–399, orig. emphasis)

While Margolin’s split-page discourse depicts two text columns, which compete for filling the single discourse slot of a text schema, Genette’s palimpsest

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Figure 13: Hypertextual ambiguity: Genette’s “palimpsest”.

applies beyond the schema of a single text (i.e., of an isolatable textuality), depicting two texts whose relatedness creates a multiple, interconnected form of (trans- and hyper-)textuality.37

4.1.5 The irreducible perspectivity of ambiguity Although I have summarised the approaches discussed so far under the label of ambiguity, it has to be noted that the models under consideration theorise quite different kinds of ambiguity. Some ambiguities are meaning-related (such as Ryan’s polyfunctional events) while others are more structural in nature (such as Margolin’s divided text format). What is even more important is that while some models (e.g. the depiction of alternative plots) highlight the competitive dimension of ambiguity (events compete for diegetic factuality), other approaches (such as Genette’s palimpsest) foreground the aspect of co-presence rather than that of competition. Narratological approaches thus confirm Empson’s and Otty and Roberts’s observations, according to which the concept of ambiguity is itself ambiguous, used sometimes to denote mere multiplicity (i.e., co-presence), sometimes to denote the inconsistence or uncertainty that results from multiplicity (i.e., competition). How should one react to the ambiguousness of the concept of ambiguity? Should one disambiguate it? Doing so would, in my opinion, manifest an inclination toward what Tsur (2012, 243) calls “rapid categorization” (as opposed to delayed categorisation) in scientific research. “Rapid categorization has the obvious advantage of allowing fast response to rapidly-changing situations, but at the expense of ignoring much vital precategorial information” (2012, 2). Narrowing down the ambiguity of the concept would simplify its use

37 What I said above about the relevance of Margolin’s approach to narrativity is also valid for Genette’s theory: hypertextuality also occurs in narrative texts; it is a form of ambiguity that can (also) be narrative.

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as an analytical tool, but it would risk “to suppress those attributes of the objects and situations which do not conform with [it]” (Tsur 2012, 132). As Tsur points out in his chapter on defamiliarisation: “When [. . .] we encounter some deviation from the familiar, the best way to handle it, in poetry as in life, is by formulating a more complex hypothesis” (2012, 132). Accordingly, I propose to request the reason of ambiguity’s ambiguity instead of eluding it by means of a premature disambiguation. One of the sources of the ambiguousness of ambiguity may be the fact that researchers who examine forms of ambiguity focus on different aspects of the same phenomenon, these differences in the research focus being irreducible. There is thus an irreducible perspectivity in talking about (and looking into) ambiguity. In order to understand this, we need to see that ambiguity is linked to coherence in two regards. Firstly, what all the narratological ambiguities considered above have in common is that they complicate the creation of a coherent narrative gestalt (be it on the levels of story, discourse, or text). Counterfactual plots complicate the construction of an event string (and release a complex network of virtually embedded events); polyfunctional events complicate the creation of a functional event gestalt; a divided text format complicates the perception of a narrative discourse gestalt (and, therefore, the act of reading); finally, hypertextual palimpsests complicate the creation of a (narrative) text (and meaning) gestalt. Ambiguity can thus be considered as a phenomenon that basically triggers processes of coherence in progress, forcing readers to handle the co-presence of two (more or less competing or dissonant) items. If ambiguity, however, is intertwined with coherence, it brings all the complexities of the latter into play; it shares with coherence the emergence at the nexus (or within the continuum) of text and reader, which explains why ambiguity is sometimes considered “as a property of an object [ . . . .] and [sometimes] as a feature of the observer’s response or psychological process” (Otty and Roberts 2013, 42); secondly, it shares with coherence its processual versus resultative dimensions. In other words, if forms of literary ambiguity bring coherence into play, they cannot but replicate the contrast between coherence in progress and resultative coherence. I contend that it is this inner contrast of coherence that lies behind the contrast between ambiguity‘s dimension of competition versus co-presence. (A research focus on) The competitive dimension of ambiguity correlates with (a research focus on) coherence in progress, while the (research focus on the) dimension of co-presence corresponds to (a research focus on) resultative coherence. Take, for example, event ambiguity. As long as the reader, who is in the process of reading and conceptualising a novel, asks him-/herself which of two

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possible (“disnarrated”) events will be realised by the actual plot, there is coherence in progress; the events compete to fill the corresponding event slot. As soon as the reader knows how the plot actually continues, having terminated the work of conceptualisation, there is resultative coherence. Correspondingly, the competitive dimension decreases, since the counterfactual events are integrated into the narrative gestalt of the plot as unrealised, yet “tellable” and “co-present” possibilities. There is thus a link between the resultative and processual dimensions of coherence and the ambiguity of ambiguity. Just as coherence cannot be reduced to one of its two dimensions, ambiguity cannot be reduced to either its competitive dimension or to the aspect of co-presence. The same can be said about the opposition between what theories of ambiguity designate as ambiguity’s inner multiplicity (which actually corresponds to the competitive aspect) versus unity (which amounts to copresence). It has to be noted, however, that approaches to ambiguity differ as to whether they accept the two terms of this opposition, which make ambiguity ambiguous, or whether they try to disambiguate it. Empson (1973, 271), for example, explicitly does justice to the two dimensions, declaring that, after having emphasised the multiplicity (and thus the competitive dimension) of ambiguity, he “ought at this point to pay decent homage to the opposing power” (of unity and co-presence). Otty and Roberts (2013, 52), on the contrary, argue in favour of the unifying dimension, proposing to conceive of ambiguity as “a kind of synthetic power” and not as a form of dissonance. Faced with ambiguity’s ambiguity, they thus tends towards what Tsur calls “rapid closure”, thereby diminishing the competitive dimension of ambiguity. Ryan (1991), for her part, takes the two dimensions into consideration in her model of virtual plot networks insofar as she integrates the conceptual stances of both progressive contingency (which implies coherence in progress and, respectively, the competitive dimension of the plot development) and retrospective necessity (which implies resultative coherence and, respectively, plot ambiguity as a co-presence of actual and virtual event paths). Interestingly, some approaches ascribe functions to ambiguous phenomena, thus providing their “multiplicity” or “duplicity” with a functional unity. Ryan (1991), for example, assigns the function of tellability to the ambiguity of polyfunctional events and of plot virtualities. Tellability “embraces”, so to speak, the inconsistent or competing parts of the plot network and provides them with a higher-level integrated gestalt (which takes the form of a readerly effect or function). Another example is the ambiguity of the palimpsest: Genette finds a “type of merit (of ‘beauty’) [. . .] in hypertextual ambiguity” (Genette 1997, 398). He thus ascribes (on the basis of a freely admitted subjectivism) an aesthetic function to

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the palimpsest, which unifies the inconsistency of hypertextual duplicity in terms of a higher-level, beautiful gestalt. Empson links beauty to unification (or integration) as well: “Most of the ambiguities I have considered here seem to me beautiful; I consider, then, that I have shown by example, in showing the nature of the ambiguity, the nature of the forces which are adequate to hold it together” (1973, 272). Otty and Roberts’s (2013) plea for a synthetic, unified conception of ambiguity, finally, is based on the ascription of a cognitive function to ambiguous multiplicity. By equating (or blending) the ambiguity of art and the cognitive mechanism of blending, the authors naturalise and thus unify the inner multiplicities of ambiguity, presenting them as an integral part of a unique human mode of thinking. I will now turn to the second link between ambiguity and coherence. Not only are the ambiguities that we find in art linked to coherence in progress, but also the conceptualisation of ambiguity itself. Ambiguity is a highly abstract concept. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim that people conceptualise abstract concepts in terms of more concrete concepts, using cognitive metaphors. Scholars provide the abstract concept of ambiguity with concreteness by means of temporal and spatial metaphors. If Genette, for example, describes the ambiguity of the palimpsest by saying that one text can become “superimposed” upon another, he uses a spatial metaphor. Margolin, on the contrary, describes the corresponding ambiguity in temporal terms as he refers to split-page discourse as “simultaneous” acts of narration.38 Models of narrative coherence work with spatial and temporal metaphors as well. My opposition between coherence in progress and resultative coherence, for instance, is time-bound, drawing on the difference between the ongoing process of reading and thinking and the moment when this process has ended.39 The same is true for Tsur’s (2012) idea of “delayed” categorisation. Dancygier’s (2012b) model, by contrast, is prima facie based on spatial metaphors as she works with the idea of “narrative spaces” and “levels”. Dancygier contends that the creation of coherence develops with the conceptual integration of narrative spaces, which amounts to an ascension from the lowest level of textually configured spaces to the highest level of resultative story coherence (the allembedding “story viewpoint space”). What I call coherence in progress happens, in Dancygier’s model, on a “low” level of structure, while resultative coherence is situated at the top. Her model thus relies on the spatial metaphor of a vertical

38 Since models of narrative coherence work with spatial and temporal metaphors as well, metaphorical descriptions of ambiguity can be correlated with models of coherence. 39 By assigning these two dimensions to two “levels” of the Pyramid of narrativity, I am providing it, however, also with a spatial conceptual dimension.

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axis: disintegrated, consecutively presented narrative information, which has not yet become integrated, is “down” (deeply embedded in the narrative structure), while story elements that are already integrated – especially the story as a whole – represent a “higher” level of narrative structure. At this point, temporal and spatial metaphors coincide. This metaphorical nexus is structured by correlated dichotomies (low-level structure/temporal progression/coherence in progress versus high-level structural/ temporal closure / resultative coherence) and is interconnected with ambiguity, which is equally structured by two main components (competition versus co-presence): “low-level” (not yet fully integrated) narrative structures correlate with the competitive dimension of ambiguity, while “high-level” narrative structures, which display a high degree of integration and resultative coherence, highlight the dimension of co-presence and unity. Accordingly, researchers who tend to focus on resultative coherence will probably feel inclined to theorise ambiguity in terms of co-presence and unity, while a focus on coherence in progress is likely to produce a heightened awareness of the competitive dimension of ambiguity. The ambiguity of ambiguity is thus probably due to an irreducible perspectivity from which depends whether . . . 1. . . . one focusses either on its incongruent (“competitive”) dimension or on its more holistic dimension (of “blended”, “co-present” elements); 2. . . . one highlights its processual or resultative dimensions (e.g. “diverging” plots versus “plot network”); 3. . . . one focuses by tendency more on its textual or structural origins (textual pole) or more on its cognitive (and/or emotive) effects or functions (readerly pole). 4. . . . one conceptualises it in temporal or spatial terms (“simultaneity” versus “superposition” of discordant elements);

4.1.6 Spatial concepts of ambiguity: Layered meanings or network of meanings? Before I turn to Jakobson’s ‘projection principle’, I would like to discuss the following problem. If one conceptualises ambiguity in spatial terms, then there are two competing ways of describing ambiguity: either in terms of a superposition, according to which ambiguity could be illustrated by a pile of layered or superimposed meanings, or in terms of a web of interconnected meanings, which could be represented as a network. Genette’s palimpsest, for example, clearly uses the former image; the terminology of “hypertext” and “hypotext” makes blatantly obvious that Genette conceptualises hypertextual ambiguity as

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something that is made up of two textual layers.40 Ryan, on the contrary, uses the network image when she analyses plot ambiguity as a “variety of forking paths [projected] on the narrative map” and the “complex field of unrealised possibilities” (Ryan 2005b, 590). We encounter this methodological problem also in Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory. Already the word “blending” evokes the idea of elements projected upon one another, thereby evoking a model of layered, overlapping meanings. Nonetheless, their theoretical framework uses primarily the network as a conceptual pattern in order to describe the emergence of new meanings.41 Are the layered model and the network model thus two different ways of expressing the same idea? I would generally answer this question in the affirmative because there are many ambiguous phenomena that could be adequately described with each of the two models. Nonetheless, it is important to note that these two means of conceptualising ambiguity are not equivalent or exchangeable ways of expressing one and the same idea. I hold that each of the two models may be more or less adequate for conceptualising ambiguity, depending on the phenomenon one wishes to describe, on the goal one pursues as well as on the perspective that one assumes with respect to that goal. To be more precise, my claim is that the perspectivities number 1, 2 and 3,42 identified above (see end of section 4.1.5), influence, within the domain of spatial metaphors, the choice between a layered and a network model. Perspectivity number 1, which refers to the alternative focus on the incongruent versus holistic dimensions of ambiguity, concerns the question to know how deep one zooms into the object under consideration or, in other words, which level of the ambiguous object one examines (incongruent microstructural details versus holistic macrostructural gestalt). Take, for instance, the ambiguity of plot virtuality. If one zooms into the plot and focuses on a single event for which the narrative offers several consequential narrative paths (→ microstructural incongruence), a layered model would be an adequate means for expressing the 40 Genette’s approach testifies indeed to the equivalence between the spatial and the temporal process of conceptualising ambiguity. While the idea of a “hypotext” conceptualises this text spatially as lying beneath the hypertext, the hypotext as also described in temporal terms as the “texte antérieur” (Genette 1992, 16). 41 The blended space is conceptualised as an emergent space, which, in the figures designed to illustrate blending, is sharply secluded from the input spaces. Nonetheless, the blended space contains elements of the two inputs spaces, as if these spaces would have been (partially and transparently) projected upon one another so as to form a conceptual palimpsest. 42 Perspectivity number 4 (spatial versus temporal conceptualisation) is already implied by the fact that the layered model and the network model are both spatially configured.

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co-presence of several competing strings of events. If, on the contrary, we zoom out and focus on the story as whole (macrostructural gestalt), a network model, such as that used by Ryan (1991), is better suited in order to express the complex interweaving between factual and virtual paths. The same example can also be used to illustrate the influence that perspectivity number 2 (i.e. the alternative focus on processual versus resultative dimensions of ambiguity) has on the choice of the more adequate model: readers who, during the reading process, experience how the plot branches off into several alternatives will probably tend to use a layered model in order to express the competition between plot possibilities, while the plot virtuality that results from the whole story may be more adequately represented by a network model. Finally, also the third perspectivity, which touches on the text- versus cognition-based approaches, can make a difference for the choice of the adequate model. If one takes an epistemological stance that analyses ambiguity in textual terms rather than in terms of cognition, one will probably tends towards a layered model. If one is, conversely, interested in representing cognitive processes, one will be inclined to use a network model rather than a layered model. These correlations are easily explained in terms of “analogicity” (see section 3.1.2), the latter meaning that the “structure of the model is identical to that of the state of affairs it represents” (Tapiero 2007, 46). Cognition is a function of the brain, which consists of neuronal networks. It thus seems plausible, with regard to analogicity, to use spatial network models in order to illustrate cognitive processes. Texts, on the contrary, are syntagmatically configured: they have a linear, horizontal shape and are linearly (horizontally) processed in a time-consuming manner. If one takes into consideration that the concept of “layer” has a horizontal shape as well, then one sees that the horizontal axis offers a conceptual link between layered models of ambiguity and textuality. This link becomes even stronger if one considers that also time, which is linked to textuality via the (timeconsuming) reading processes, is – in this day and age, according to Western cultural norms – horizontally conceptualised (as it becomes obvious in graphs that represent temporal developments on a horizontal axis). To illustrate this claim, one can think, for instance, of Turner and Fauconnier’s cognitive blending networks, which do, strictly speaking, not integrate textual elements. Although a blending network is susceptible to explaining the structure of linguistic (or other kinds of) signs, the textual stimulus itself is not meant to be a part of the network, but only the interplay of mental spaces, which leads to verbal output. Genette’s palimpsest, on the contrary, does not focus on cognition, but textuality: it uses a layered model in order describe the relationship of hypertext and hypotext (superposition of two texts).

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Each and every theoretical model that analyses one or another form of ambiguity will thus have to weigh the alternatives and to choose the model that best fits the model’s perspective and aims. As we will see below, I have chosen – despite my rhizomatic approach – a layered model rather than a network model in order to match to my focus of research. I contend that, on a very general level, layered models of ambiguity primarily serve the function of focussing on how ambiguous meanings are compressed in a text – thereby highlighting what is generally called the text’s “density” –, while network models of ambiguity tend to focus on how the meanings evoked by a text conceptually interact in their de- (or pre-) compressed state.

4.2 Jakobson’s projection principle and narrative projection Roman Jakobson (1988) has presented a sophisticated approach to ambiguity in his article “Linguistics and Poetics” (originally published 1960). Jakobson’s primary concern is to give a linguistic account of literariness. What is it that characterises “poetry”43? Poetry, in his eyes, lives by “ambiguity” and a “throughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence” (Jakobson 1988, 49). His essay aims at explaining the nature of this poetic ambiguity. Starting from the conviction that language has to be explored in the diversity of its functions, Jakobson develops a model of six constitutive factors that participate in verbal communication (sender, receiver, message, context, code and channel). He also identifies six verbal functions that correlate with these factors (sender focus: emotive function, receiver focus: conative function, message focus: poetic function, context focus: referential function, code focus: metalingual function, channel focus: phatic function). According to Jakobson, verbal messages differ primarily in how their linguistic functions are ranked. For instance, a message that concentrates on checking whether the channel of communication is functioning well (“Hello, can you hear me?”) puts the phatic (channel-related) function onto the highest position of the functional hierarchy, while imperative verbal messages (“Don’t touch that!”) are dominated by the conative (receiver-related) function. Jakobson holds that literary messages have one thing in common: the highest position of their functional hierarchies is occupied by the poetic (message-related) function. He defines the poetic function as “[t]he set (Einstellung) toward the message as such” and as the “focus on the message for its own sake” (37, orig. emphasis).

43 Jakobson uses the word “poetry” in order to refer to linguistic works of arts in general, not exclusively to lyric poetry.

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The poetic function, insofar as it dominates the other functions in any literary message, is thus crucial for literariness. Consequently, it should be able to explain literature’s “ambiguity” and “polysemantic essence”. If the poetic function is primarily defined by the fact that it produces a “focus on the message for its own sake”, two questions arise. Firstly, by which means do literary texts achieve this focus? And secondly, what is the link between literature’s “focus on the message for its own sake” and its “ambiguity”? Jakobson answers the first question with his famous projection principle, which introduces the idea of an interplay between a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic axis: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (39, orig. emphasis). In other words, there is a “projection of the equational principle into the sequence”, a “superposition of similarity upon contiguity” (50–51). The political slogan “I like Ike”, quoted by Jakobson (38), repeatedly projects one and the same diphthong (/ay/) onto the syntagmatic sequence of the sentence, thereby producing a “focus on the message for its own sake”. Jakobson illustrates the poetic function primarily with examples from lyric poetry. Rhymes, for instance, are an excellent example of how similar sounds (i.e. several elements selected from the same phonetic paradigm) are projected into a lyric syntagm, thereby becoming contiguous on the axis of combination. This projection can be understood as a clash of syntagmatic and paradigmatic codes. Phonemes, which are paradigmatic categories, do not by themselves carry semantic information, while syntactic structures, which combine paradigmatic elements on a syntagmatic axis, do produce semantic content and meaning. The salient presence of equivalent elements of phonemic paradigms within the syntagmatic order cues readers to negotiate between these two semiotic orders, to understand the one in terms of the other in order to create coherence. In the meantime, the similarity established by the paradigmatic order catches the attention of readers, thereby creating “a set towards the message as such”. The second question is more difficult to answer. If literature is characterised both by the “focus on the message for its own sake” and by “ambiguity”, what is the link between these two characteristics? Jakobson stresses their relatedness by explaining that “[a]mbiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message” (49). In this connection, we need to clarify the relationship between projection, repetition and superposition. If equivalent elements from the paradigmatic axis are projected into the syntagmatic axis, it is the repetition of equivalent items (as in the “I like Ike” example) that produces the focus on the message for its own sake. But ambiguity is bound to the cognitive consequences of projection and repetition – as Jakobson explains: “Words

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similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” (50). In other words, phonetically similar expressions tend to be understood in terms of each other, such that their multiplicity forms a unity. In the quotation, the metaphorical expression “drawn together” is thus obviously synonymous to that of “superimposed” (49) and both expressions refer to the same kind of co-presence that characterises ambiguity. Genette describes ambiguity on the level of transtextuality as a superposition of different texts (and text meanings); Jakobson explores ambiguity on the intratextual level as a superposition of paradigmatic elements, such as phonemes and words (and word meanings). A further aspect of Jakobson’s literary ambiguity comes into play if we take Lotman’s (2001) claim into consideration that new meaning is created by the clash of two asymmetrical codes or semiotic orders. Are the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, invoked by Jakobson, not exactly such asymmetrical codes? According to Lotman, if two codes are asymmetrical, this means that there is not a 1:1 correspondence between them. Consequently, they cannot be translated into one another without accrual of meaning. Is it not exactly such a surplus of meaning (or of a meaning potential) that is designated by Jakobson’s ambiguity and described by the projection principle? If “words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” due to the repetition of equivalent items, a similarity, anchored in the paradigmatic code, pervades the semantic order of the syntagmatic code, thus producing a clash of codes. Jakobson’s projection principle describes the acts of translation that take place between these two codes and shows how these acts of intercodal translation create new – ambiguous – meanings. That Jakobson’s projection principle describes the structural speciality of lyric poetry well is widely acknowledged (see, for example, Link 1981; Weich 1998, 21–43). Nonetheless, it has to be emphasised that Jakobson’s projection principle was not designed to be reduced to lyric poetry; it describes more generally the nature of the dominant, “poetic function” of literature (and thus literariness). Jakobson himself maintains that “[i]n poetry not only the phonological sequence but in the same way any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation. Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its throughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence” (49, emphasis mine). This quote is important in three regards. Firstly, it highlights, once again, the large scope of Jakobson’s projection principle (“any sequence [. . .]”): it is not restricted to lyric phenomena, but concerns literariness in general. Secondly, it has theoretical implications that go beyond a purely “structuralist” approach and that allow for the integration of cognitive aspects. If Jakobson maintains that, in poetry, “any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation”, what should that denote if not attempts, on the part of readers, to create an integrated gestalt? What should

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it mean if not the efforts that arise with coherence in progress? What can the “equation” refer to, if not to a coherent “mental model”, which can be created from the “paradigmatic” conceptual integration of syntagmatically distributed information? (It is in view of these implicitly cognitivist aspects that I have decided to build on Jakobson’s approach within my more cognition-oriented approach.) Thirdly, if literature functions according to the projection principle, and thus by acts of translation between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, between “sequence” and “equation” or, linguistically speaking, between “horizontal” and “vertical coherence” (see Viehweger 1989, 264),44 then Jakobson claims a principled gap (or untranslatability, as Lotman would put it) between literary texts (textual-syntagmatic code) and their meanings (cognitive-paradigmatic code). Interpretations try, of course, to bridge this gap. But the abundance of (often conflicting) interpretations of the same literary texts creates a competition of (interpretative) meanings that is typical for ambiguity. If Jakobson (1988, 50–51) borrows from Empson the statement according to which “[t]he machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry”, then he might have had in mind a literary gap between textuality and meaning. As Jakobson’s own analysis of projections in poems shows, the projection principle is susceptible of revealing quite specific dynamics of projection (and thus specific forms of ambiguity) related to particular texts or genres. For example, the projection of sound similarities onto textual syntagms of poems is an example for a specific type of projections that may be found in poems. But what about narratives? In which way can the projection principle be said to apply to literary narratives? Inasmuch as Jakobson’s poetic function is highly intertwined with ambiguity, forms of narrative ambiguity may be a good point of departure in responding to that question. The narrative ambiguities discussed above, for example, display the same dynamic pattern of projection that Jakobson has put

44 That the distinction between the syntagmatic (horizontal) and paradigmatic (vertical) axes may be pertinent for the understanding of coherence has been highlighted early on, for instance by Viehweger, who proposes two distinguish between two kinds of semantic text processing. Viehweger’s “horizontal propositional integration” denotes “coherence relations between two or several propositions [. . .] constructed by the hearer due to the connexity of the states-of-affairs reflected by them” (Viehweger 1989, 264). “Vertical propositional integration”, by contrast, occurs when the “horizontal propositional integration” does not allow coherence to be established. Then knowledge structures are activated that enable the hearer to connect the syntagmatic elements. Considered from this angle, knowledge, which is structured into schemata, scripts, categories, stereotypes and so forth, can be associated with the paradigmatic, since any kind of paradigm is nothing but a cognitive category. Textuality, on the contrary, appears to be rather syntagmatic: its linear, horizontal sequences juxtapose and thus combine not only words and propositions, but also the paradigmatic knowledge items that are associated with them.

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forward. Event ambiguity, for example, may be understood as the projection of equivalent events onto the story axis. Their equivalence resides in the fact that they pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure; instead of the single factual event for which the plot allows at one point of its development, the narrative syntagm presents several events, thereby producing a cognitive “superposition” of narrated and disnarrated events. The same dynamic underlies plot ambiguity (superposition of factual and counterfactual plot lines), the ambiguity of functional polyvalence (superposition of several narrative functions), the ambiguity of split-page discourse (superposition of two discourses) and the ambiguity of the palimpsest (superposition of two texts). Using my framework of analysis, one can say that in each of these cases, elements of the same narrative paradigm of structure (event, plot, function, discourse, text) are projected onto the narrative syntagm, thereby producing a “superposition of similarity upon contiguity”. Jakobson’s idea of a paradigmatic axis can be adjusted to narrative dynamics if one conceptualises it as the place of conceptually similar elements that undergo projection. Narrative similarity characterises elements that pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure. If they are activated simultaneously, they can compete, in (the reception of) narratives, to fill the same conceptual slot (see Figure 14). I should emphasise that my schema is not supposed to reduce individual differences, which come up both with idiosyncratic generic schemata of narrative and with individual ways of perceiving and processing a given narrative text. One has to assume that not all readers share the same conceptual slots, some being more conventional and less idiosyncratic than others. Narrative projections that concern the narrative paradigm ‘character’, for example, will probably be intuitively noticed by the large majority of readers, since it is a very common conceptual element of the schema narrative. I would argue, in this connection, that literary characters such as Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde or Gregor Samsa are as famous as they are because of an underlying mechanism of narrative projection. In both Kafka’s and Stevenson’s novel, the narrative syntagm creates two characters (or anthropomorphic experiencers) and projects both of them onto one and the same conceptual “character” slot. As a result, the character slot is overfilled by narrative elements that pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure: the protagonist is both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or he is both Gregor (the man) and an insect. It is the resulting ambiguity of the character that is susceptible of fascinating receivers. The ambiguity of polyfunctional events, on the contrary, will probably be less easily understood by receivers, since it relies on a more professional narrative schema according to which narrative events have a “function” slot. Nonetheless, receivers may have an intuitive grasp on such ambiguities, experiencing it as a specific tension or as a “density”.

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Figure 14: Narrative projection: overfilled conceptual slots.

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To conclude and summarise my considerations, I propose to define narrative projection as a textually as well as cognitively determined process of negotiation by which texts cue readers to overfill one (or more) conceptual slots of their generic narrative schema. More precisely, the textual syntagm triggers the activation or creation of two (or more) frames that pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure. The effect is, in Jakobson’s terms, the superposition of (narrative) paradigmatic similarity upon (narrative) syntagmatic contiguity. Before I turn to the narrative projection in Les Liaisons dangereuses, I should emphasise, again, that “paradigmatic similarity” does not mean that the elements projected onto the narrative syntagm are similar in any other regard than that of pertaining to the same paradigm of structure. Consider the narrative projection of character in Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde: the two sides of the personality of the protagonist are clearly antagonistic rather than equivalent. I would even go so far as to say that is the sharp contrast between these two competing “character” frames that makes their narrative projection so captivating. As my literary analyses will show, this contrariness of competing paradigmatic items is a constitutive factor of narrative projection.

4.3 Les Liaisons dangereuses: Ambiguities and forms of narrative projection 4.3.1 Introduction Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), translated in 1784 (Dangerous Connections),45 is not only, as Pomeau (1993, 17) states, the endpoint of a whole tradition of the libertine novel. It has repeatedly been acknowledged that the novel stands out because it brings the epistolary genre, as Rousset (1983, 88) puts it, to the “point of perfection”. Versini pays tribute to “the mastery that Laclos demonstrates in the handling of the epistolary genre” (“la maîtrise dont Laclos fait preuve dans l’ultilisation du genre épistolaire”, 1968, 430; transl. mine). Moravetz’s comparative study of Richardson’s Clarissa (1747/48), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) comes to the conclusion that it is Laclos’s novel that exploits the full potential of the genre (1990, 276). In

45 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from Maurice Allem’s (1951) edition of Les Liaisons dangereuses in the Œuvres complètes de Choderlos de Laclos, abbreviated as LD. I am working with the English translation from 1784, quoted as DC.

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order to grasp the exclusiveness and narrative specialties of Les Liaisons dangereuses, it is necessary to consider, first of all, its epistolary form. Epistolary novels can either be “monological” (that is, constituted by the voice of only one character) or “polyphonic”; in the latter case, they present an exchange of letters between several characters (see Moravetz 1990, 31). Moravetz highlights, however, that polyphony is often used to denote at least three different things, which she proposes to differentiate terminologically: (i) Mehrstimmigkeit (“plurality of voices”), which, in Moravetz’s terminology, refers to the fact that letters are written by several characters, i.e. that several voices are speaking in the novel; (ii) Polyperspektivik (“poly-” or “multiperspectivity”) according to which there are several voices, which represent different ideological positions, and (iii) Polyphonie (“polyphony”) in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, according to which there is a variety of voices and of ideological positions, which cannot be interpretatively homogenised or hierarchised; in other words, the “message” of the novel cannot be identified with one of the voices and ideological positions of the characters, but resides precisely in the way the novel confronts, contrasts or “orchestrates” them. I agree with Moravetz’s view according to which Les Liaisons dangereuses, which creates an intricate network of interwoven plot lines, voices and psychosemantics, fulfils all three criteria. For those who are not familiar with the noveI, I would like to provide a short summary of it. It has to be noted in advance, however, that any summary of this novel cannot but add interpretative meanings to the fictional collection of letters. This concerns, on the one hand, the narrative structure of the novel. Should a summary respect the division of the novel into four parts? Delon’s (1986, 6–9) summary does so, but he analyses, in addition to that, the novel as revolving around three guiding questions.46 On the other hand, interpretation comes into play inasmuch as important cues, which could provide the intradiegetic action with coherence (especially causality and character homogeneity), are, in a way, withheld – or rather the contrary: there is such an overwhelming plurality of cues that resultative coherence is hard to establish. Readers are thus confronted with the necessity of engaging in processes of coherence in progress.47 The letters presented by the novel stem from a little, almost entirely noble group of people who are connected with each other by the bonds of friendship,

46 Namely the following: (i) Will Merteuil manage to avenge herself on Gercourt and thereby corrupt Cécile? (ii) Will Valmont manage to seduce the Presidente? (iii) Will the complicity of Valmont and Merteuil endure despite their divergent interests? (See Delon 1986, 5). 47 Delon relativises in a similar manner his summary of the novel: “Ce premier schéma de l’intrigue est réducteur dans la mesure où il néglige la dimension épistolaire, où il dessine une linéarité où le roman n’offre que polyphonie et polysémie” (1986, 8–9).

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kinship, sexuality or acquaintanceship. The action centres on two libertines: the Viscount de Valmont, whose self-esteem is nurtured by the frequent practice of seducing women by means of manipulation (a practice that ordinarily brings about the women’s complete emotional and social destruction), and the Marchioness de Merteuil, a widow who is Valmont’s ex-lover and a (feminine!) libertine as well. Merteuil is generally believed to live a virtuous life – a belief that contrasts sharply with reality, not only in that Merteuil’s libertine life style does in no way correspond to official norms of devoutness and austerity, but also in that she turns out to be highly vindictive and unscrupulous in her acts of vengeance. She manipulates all of her acquaintances and correspondents not only by her rhetorical sophistication, but also by her extraordinary capacity of self-control and dissimulation (see her self-portrait in letter LXXXI). The two libertines, who compete for libertine mastership, run two projects of seduction. Merteuil wants Valmont to seduct and deprave Cécile (in the English translation: Cecilia) de Volanges. Cécile – young, naïve and inexperienced in terms of societal and epistolary norms and dangers – has just been taken out from the monastery by her mother (who considers herself to be a close friend of Merteuil). Her mother, Mme de Volanges, intends to marry Cécile off to the Count Gercourt. The reason behind Merteuil’s planned intrigue is her desire to hit Gercourt, who has left her a while ago for another woman. Valmont initially denies Merteuil’s request because he runs another project: he wants and effectively begins to seduce the extraordinarily virtuous, devout and beautiful Présidente de Tourvel, whose husband is out of town for some time. Valmont keeps Merteuil, who is simultaneously his accomplice and competitor in terms of libertinage, up to date as to his advances, which he makes thanks to the highly manipulative letters that he writes to Tourvel. The projects of the two libertines become intertwined when Valmont finds out that Mme de Volanges, who knows about his libertinage, has cautioned Tourvel against him. In order to avenge himself on Mme de Volanges, he agrees to seduce Cécile, who, for her part, reciprocates the secret love of the Chevalier Danceny. Valmont manages to make Cécile his sexual playmate. He also achieves his main goal, that of seducing Tourvel. It seems, however, he has paid a high price for this victory: Merteuil suggests, scornfully and condescendingly, that Valmont has fallen in love with his victim. Merteuil seems to be jealous and unwilling to witness Valmont finding in Tourvel the love of his life. She appeals to his libertine values and principles as well as to their affinities regarding debauchment and tempts him by holding out the prospect of a sexual reunion (see letter CXXXI). Her strategy works out – Valmont finally breaks up with Tourvel by sending her a letter that has been worded by Merteuil. But after this break-up, the Marchioness reveals (or pretends to reveal) that Valmont’s act was nothing

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for her but a new victory – not over Tourvel, but over Valmont, whose behaviour she has managed to control. This is the end of their complicity and the beginning of an openly declared “war”, which turns out to be short and destructive. Merteuil seduces Danceny and informs him about the sexual relations between Valmont and Cécile by showing him the respective letters, written by Valmont. Consequently, Danceny challenges Valmont to a duel during which Valmont dies – just a moment earlier than Tourvel, who, in the greatest despair for having been misled and left, loses her mind and expires in the monastery of her childhood. Danceny dissociates himself from Cécile, due to the recent disclosures, and enlists for military service on Malta. Cécile retires back to live her life in a monastery. Valmont, who, dying, has reconciled with Danceny, has bequeathed significant letters, written by Merteuil, to Danceny, due to which the society finally gets wind of the mastermind behind the whole tragedy and learns about Merteuil’s true nature and intrigues. The Marchioness finally leaves town – not only financially ruined by a lost case and socially humiliated by a moment of public repudiation in the opera, but also severely marked by smallpox. The whole correspondence, which constitutes this story, is finally transmitted to Mme de Rosemonde, the elderly aunt of Valmont and former confidente of Mme de Tourvel, whose country residence has provided the setting for many of Valmont’s libertine machinations. How the whole collection of letters has finally come into the hands of the fictional éditeur (the one who publishes the letters), the rédacteur (the one who has selected and arranged the letters) and then into the hands of us, the readers, remains enigmatic from a diegetic perspective, especially if one considers Mme de Rosemonde’s opinion according to which the sorrowful events should be left in the oblivion suitable to them (see letter CLXXII).48 In which way does this novel exploit the full potential of the genre? First of all, its mastery is surely due to what Moravetz (1990) calls the “plurality of voices” and “polyperspectivity”. Not only do all the central characters of the novel have their own voices and (more or less) differing ideological positions, but their letters form a dense web of cross-correspondences; at least with regard to the most central characters, nearly everybody corresponds with everybody else (see Figure 15).49

48 According to Rousset (1983, 96), this statement of Mme de Rosemonde hints at an infraction of epistolary intimacy, which continues the list of former infractions – but this time, it is not one of the characters, but us, the readers of the novel, who behave indiscreetly. 49 The way Figure 15 places the characters on semantico-ideological axes is admittedly highly disputable and only one out of a number of possible ways of structuring the interactions between the characters. The research literature has rightly emphasised, for example, that Mme

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Figure 15: Network of (the most important) voices in Les Liaisons dangereuses, completed by semantico-ideological axes (following Moravetz 1990, 109–131, 217–244).

Only the relation between Tourvel and Merteuil is exempted from this rule, the only direct epistolary connection between them being Valmont’s break-up letter whose wording stems directly from Merteuil. Moravetz’s reception-oriented approach to epistolary narratives highlights the fact that the juxtaposition of letters creates a tessellated narrative structure, which lives by what Iser calls “blanks”. As I have explained in greater detail above (see section 3.1.4), Iser’s notion of “blanks” is linked to interpretative dynamics and indeterminacy and complies with my concept of coherence in progress. Remember that, according to Iser, blanks “indicate that the different segments of the text are to be connected, even though the text itself does not say so. [. . .] [W]hen the schemata and perspectives have been linked together, the blanks ‘disappear’” (1978, 182–183). Drawing on Iser’s blanks, Moravetz holds – probably in allusion to Todorov’s vision stéreoscopique 50 – that the polyphonic and dialogic

de Volanges is rather following social conventions than an inner sense of virtue, and that what initially seems to be genuine passion on Danceny’s part falls increasingly under the suspicion of libertinage. Also Cécile becomes affected by Valmont’s libertinage and it could be discussed whether Merteuil’s urge for vengeance has its origin in passionate feelings. Also the “fall” of Tourvel is due to passion; she can thus be said to move from the axis of virtue to the axis of passion, or to pertain to both axes. Placing the characters on semantic axes should contribute to understanding the constellation of characters, but it suppresses the ambiguity that inheres in the characters and their relationships. 50 According to Todorov, “la lettre a [. . .] deux utilisations complémentaires: d’une part, les lettres des différents personnages sur un même événement (ou personnage) nous en donnent une ‘vision stéréoscopique’; d’autre part, les différentes lettres d’une même personne révèlent la complexité – ou l’hypocrisie – de cette personne, son habileté à revêtir des masques différents”

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epistolary structure of Les Liaisons dangereuses provokes a “stereo reading” (“Stereo-Lesen”).51 Inasmuch as the whole diversity of intradiegetic letter writers is present in the intradiegetic discourse, readers adopt (at least, as I would add) two perspectives at once: those of the sender and of the addressee (see Moravetz 1990, 38).52 There is thus a “potential connectivity” (“ausgesparte Anschließbarkeit”, Iser 1976, 284) between these two perspectives, which is distinctive of Iser’s blanks. If the reader adopts more than one perspective, s/ he establishes a connectivity between them, which is offered by the text only in terms of what Iser calls “virtuality”. The importance of such a perspectival connectivity is also highlighted by Altman who contends that “we read any given letter from at least three points of view – that of the intended or actual recipient as well as that of the writer and our own” (1982, 111). Such double- or triple-reading processes become quite complicated in Les Liaisons dangereuses, since letters are often included in other letters and forwarded to other recipients. As a consequence, not only are the numbers of addresses and of actual recipients not identical, but there are often allusions and covert meanings, which are designed to be understood only by one or the other of the secret receivers. That is, the letter exchanges deviate, within the diegetic universe, from standard norms of epistolary communication. Delon has highlighted the extent to which copies, doubles and faked letters infiltrate the epistolary space (see Delon 1986, 54). Letters are intercepted, conveyed by divers ruses against the will of the receiver, forwarded to or taken into possession not only by non-addressed, but also by unintended readers. What is more, letters are often not written by the supposed author: Valmont dicte à Danceny ce qu’il droit écrire à Cécile [. . .] et s’accorde la joie maligne de la réciproque: dicter à Cécile une lettre à Danceny. Cette lettre, derrière l’échange apparent entre les jeunes amoureux, cache un dialogue entre les anciens amants, puisque Valmont [. . .] s’adresse, par l’intermédiaire de Danceny, à Merteuil. Le dialogue épistolaire est biaisé (Delon 1986, 53) et perverti.53

(1967, 39) Accordingly, “la pluralité de perceptions donne une vision plus complexe du phénomène décrit” (81). 51 Laclos’s novel shares this polyphonic complexity with its famous predecessor novels: “Le roman se constitue de l’entrelacement de ces correspondances et des décalages temporels, psychologiques et idéologiques, qui séparent les divers épistoliers. Les grands roman de Richardson et le chef-d’œuvre de Rousseau exploitent et diffusent cette forme polyphonique” (Delon 1986, 46). 52 I will elaborate on this question further below. 53 “Valmont dictates to Danceny what he should write to Cécile [. . .] and takes malicious delight in the reverse: dictating a letter for Danceny to Cécile. This letter conceals, behind the visible epistolary exchange between the young lovers, a dialogue between the former lovers,

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What Delon calls a “perversion” of epistolary dialogue is labelled “denaturation” by Rousset: “Il faut avouer qu’il est difficile de faire mieux en fait de dénaturation; du départ à l’arrivée, toutes les phases d’une communication normale sont faussées et déplacées pour produire ce monstre épistolaire”54 (Rousset 1983, 94). But even if letters are directly transmitted to the addressees, the novel creates friction and indecisiveness.55 What seems to be real and what is real are often indistinguishable56 because of the difficulty of acknowledging the difference between what Wolpe (1960, 33) calls “lettres fardées” [disguised letters] and “non fardées” [undisguised] or between what Altman (1978) calls “addressed” and “undressed language”. Undressed language aims at a 1:1 correspondence between les mots et les choses (i.e., between words and world, see Stewart 1982); it should lend transparency to the sender’s feelings, experiences or thoughts. Accordingly, undressed language can be described, in terms of Jakobson’s communicative functions, as fulfilling primarily an emotive function, as Moravetz (1990, 39) has pointed out. The letters written by Cécile, Tourvel and – perhaps – also Danceny 57 can be considered as representative of this kind of language. Addressed language, on the contrary, builds on the “performative”, worldbuilding power of words; its goal is not to describe one’s inner life transparently, but to create, in a utilitarian manner, a fictive picture of oneself and/or of one’s experiences. In order to achieve this goal, authors need to feign undressed language, i.e. to master the “foreign language” of transparency and/or honnêteté [honesty, virtue, decency].58 Letters that use addressed language

since Valmont addresses himself to Merteuil, with Danceny serving as intermediary. The epistolary dialogue is distorted and perverted” (transl. mine). 54 “One has to admit that this is hard to top in terms of denaturation; from the beginning to the end, all phases of ordinary communication are distorted and displaced so as to produce this epistolary monster” (transl. mine). 55 See Delon (1986, 60–61). 56 In his structural analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Todorov makes the same distinction, but initially confines it to the perception of the characters: “On peut [. . .] postuler l’existence de deux niveaux de rapports, celui de l’être et du paraître. Ces termes concernent la perception des personnages et non celle du lecteur” (1967, 61). In his considerations on the literary aspect of the narrative, he adds, however, that paraître becomes dominant in the last part of the novel; it thus also concerns the reader: “Si le récit précédent était mené au niveau de l’être, le récit de la fin est entièrement dans le paraître. Le lecteur ne sait pas quelle est la vérité, il ne connaît que les apparences” (77). 57 ‘Undecidability’ comes into play here, inasmuch as the mastery of addressed language, as it is illustrated by many of Valmont’s and Merteuil’s letters, brings under suspicion the apparently undressed language of Danceny (see Delon 1986, 50). 58 On the importance of honnêteté for Laclos’s novel, see chapter 4 of the first part of Versini’s (1968) study.

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fulfil primarily a conative function, since they are designed to have a specific, calculated effect on the addressee (see Moravetz 1990, 39). Merteuil is clearly the master of addressed language, superior even to Valmont who often loses control over his language in his letters to Merteuil and fails to foresee the effects that his deliberations will have on her.59 Addressed language is thus characterised by a certain duplicity, which derives from the co-presence of two layers of meaning: true feelings and experiences are covered by fakes, the authentic self is hidden behind the words of a feigned personality. But are there really only two layers of meaning? It seems, indeed, as if there is more than one alternative to the expression of authentic feelings. As Moravetz points out, readers do not only have to deal with feigned positions (“fingierte Position”, 1990, 217), i.e. with epistolary utterances that are intended to project a false image of oneself, but also with “relativised positions” (“Positionsrelativierung”, 217), i.e. with epistolary utterances that unintendedly reveal an emotion or an attitude of which the sender himself is not aware. Moravetz argues that relativised positions occur when the sender has feelings or values that do not cohere with the dominant parts of his/her values, such that the sender needs to suppress these psychic parts. The rejected position then sneaks into the language of the sender unnoticed and relativises his/her dominant ideological position (see Moravetz 1990, 217). Relativised positions can be found, for instance, in Tourvel’s letters. While virtue, which represents her dominant ideological position, demands sincerity and therefore perfect transparency between acting and speaking, she shows a lack of sincerity when she spies on Valmont. She also sublimates her growing passion because it threats her ideal of tranquillity (see Moravetz 1990, 223). Also Valmont’s letters are, from early on, littered with utterances that relativise his dominant, libertine position and let shine through passionate love: “Je n’ai plus qu’une idée; j’y pense le jour, et j’y rêve la nuit. J’ai bien besoin d’avoir cette femme, pour me sauver du ridicule d’en être amoureux” (LD, 18, letter IV).60

59 Warning (2007, 397–398), however, cautions against such a reading, even against asking whether Valmont’s epistolary raving about the sexual-emotional union with Tourvel betrays true, non-libertine feelings, or aims at provoking Merteuil’s jealousy, for this alternative overlooks what Valmont’s epistolary activity really is: a performance, triggered by amour-propre (“amour-propre-stimulierte Performanz”, 398), and therefore an “ascension to the imaginary”, which stays beneath the symbolic level (“Steigerung ins Imaginäre [. . .] unterhalb der Ebene des Symbolischen”, 398). 60 “I have but one idea; I cherish it by day, and dream on’t by night. I must possess this woman, lest I should be so ridiculous as to be in love” (DC, 17 [letter IV]).

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Could the same be said about Merteuil? As Merteuil writes “Dans le temps où nous nous aimions car je crois que c’était de l’amour, j’étais heureuse; et vous, Vicomte!” (LD, 316),61 does she use undressed language (which would convey her true thoughts – in my eyes, a rather improbable hypothesis), addressed language (used to manipulate Valmont), or does Merteuil, while adopting a feigned position, unintentionally betray true feelings, which relativise her position? There is even a fourth possibility. Is she perhaps actually aware of having authentic feelings for Valmont, but betrays and exploits them intentionally by making them serve a goal – the destruction of Valmont – that is diametrically opposed to her most intimate, but self-censored wishes (namely that of a reunion with Valmont)? Instead of proposing an answer to these interpretative questions, I would like to draw attention to the very fact that there is a variety of meanings that may be ascribed to one and the same utterance. This indicates one of the central characteristics of the novel: its ambiguity.

4.3.2 Ambiguities and some rhizome The research literature on Les Liaisons dangereuses has proposed a bundle of key words that circle around one and the same central characteristic of the novel: ambiguity, ambivalence (Moravetz 1990, 129–130), duplicity (“duplicité fondamentale de l’écriture”, Delon 1986, 52), polyphony and polysemy (Delon 1986, 8–9), irony or paradox: Le paradoxe des Liaisons dangereuses est d’adopter la forme romanesque qui est celle de l’authenticité et d’en faire un usage ironique sinon parodique. Entre les mains des libertins, entre celles du rédacteur, toute lettre perd sa valeur de preuve d’une vérité psychologique (Delon 1986, 14) ou morale pour devenir l’arme d’une raison retorse.62

I consider ambiguity to represent the most appropriate term, insofar as it either includes or describes on a more abstract level the other terms. If ambiguity 61 “At the time we loved each other, for I believe it was love, I was happy – and you, Viscount – [. . .]” (DC, 50 [vol. IV, letter CXXXI]). It is remarkable that the French edition from 2002 of the series Le Livre de Poche, annotated by Michel Delon, does not finish the sentence with an exclamation mark (“et vous, Vicomte!”), but with a question mark (see Laclos 2002, 416). This inconsistency, which goes uncommented, is – although it is dissatisfying – significant in terms of the ambiguity of Merteuil and her relationship to Valmont. 62 “The paradox of Dangerous Connections consists of the choice of a novelistic form that stands for authenticity and to make an ironic – if not parodic – use of it. In the hands of the libertins and of the rédacteur, each and every letter loses its value as testimony of a psychological or moral truth and becomes the weapon of a sneaky intelligence” (transl. mine).

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triggers processes of coherence in progress and forces readers to handle the copresence of two (competing or dissonant) meanings, then it covers both the idea of duplicity and of polysemy. Irony and paradoxes, for their part, are based on two different types of duplicity. While an ironical statement opposes an explicit and an implied meaning, the latter contradicting the former, a paradox confronts and combines explicitly two meanings that seem to contradict each other. As to polyphony, Moravetz has differentiated three different meanings of it (see above). The third, most extensive sense of polyphony – which refers to Bakhtin’s use of it – possesses the same fundamental structure that we have found to be characteristic of ambiguity: if voices and ideological positions, presented by a novel, cannot be interpretatively homogenised or hierarchised, this means that they are not only co-present, but that they also compete with each other, for example for being the voice of what Wayne Booth calls “the implied author”. The research literature on the novel discusses questions such as: Which voice is that of the implied author? Is it a voice of virtue, which comes close to that of Tourvel? Is it a feminist voice that sometimes shines through in Merteuil’s utterances? Is it an experienced voice, such as that of Mme de Rosemonde, or a voluptuous voice such as that of Valmont? With regard to Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy, one could answer that “is”questions are the wrong questions to ask with a better concept being “and”: Substituer le ET au EST. A et B. Le ET n’est même pas une relation ou une conjonction particulières, il est ce qui sous-tend toutes les relations, la route de toutes les relations, et qui fait filer les relations hors de leurs termes et hors de l’ensemble de leurs termes, et hors de tout ce qui pourrait être déterminé comme Etre, Un ou Tout. Le ET comme extraêtre, inter-être. [. . .] le ET donne une autre direction aux relations, et fait fuir les termes et les ensembles, les uns et les autres, sur la ligne de fuite qu’il crée activement. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 71)63

Considered from this angle, the polyphony of Les Liaisons dangereuses is a rhizomatic phenomenon.64 As I explained above (see section 1.5), the rhizomatic

63 “Substitute the AND for IS. A and B. The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole. The AND is extra-being, inter-being. [. . .] the AND gives relations another direction, and puts to flight terms and sets, the former and the latter on the line of flight which it actively creates” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 57). 64 One could contrast the rhizome and the ambiguity of polyphony by saying that ambiguity lives by the tension between multiplicity and unity, while the rhizome includes multiplicity only, rejecting any unity: “always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 6). But the hostility of the rhizome against dichotomies

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“and” shields the understanding (that proceeds through “est”) from coming to a halt; it creates new relationships, new “betweens”, new multiplicities. This betweenness and multiplicity is exactly what characterises Laclos’s novel65 on quite different levels. The highest level on which ambiguity can reside is (Bakhtinian) polyphony, inasmuch as it denotes the lack of a voice that would govern the multiplicity of diegetic voices. No voice provides the novel with an interpretative unity. Bakhtinian polyphony thus denotes a betweenness on the level of the interpretation of the entire novel. On that level, one can distinguish between two interpretative approaches. On the one hand, there are interpretations that disambiguate the novel’s ambiguity (i.e. its Bakhtinian polyphony and rhizomatic betweenness) by presenting a unique interpretative meaning (i.e., an anti-rhizomatic IS) (e.g. Les Liaisons dangereuses is a feminist novel).66 On the other hand, there are interpretations that take account of the novel’s ambiguity, that is, of the broad variety (of the rhizomatic AND) of divergent interpretations. Interpretations of this kind should not be misunderstood as contenting themselves with the plurality of interpretative approaches, or as displaying a relativistic attitude. Instead, they do defend an interpretative hypothesis, which consists of the claim that interpretative ambiguity (openness, rivalry) is substantial to the novel, both to the diegetic universe and to interpretative reactions to it. Le débat critique sur le danger du roman semble lui aussi programmé par l’œuvre. Il s’inscrit à la suite des réflexions que les personnages, innocents ou coupables, mènent sur le risque d’écrire et de lire, sur les pièges du langage. La critique ne fait souvent que perpétuer ce débat interne au roman, ce qui n’est pas la moindre de ses ironies.67 (Delon 1986, 87, emphasis mine)

does not allow it to sustain this unilateral focus on multiplicity, thus bringing unity into play again (as a form of “reterritorialisation”). The rhizome thus produces the same tension between unity and multiplicity that also inheres in ambiguity. 65 As Champagne notes: “The episodic or fragmentary structure precludes a unifying order to the narrative. Hence, L.D. represents a tribute to multiplicity in its very form” (1974, 347, emphasis mine). He links this multiplicity to ambivalence and ambiguity as well as to a Deleuzian “morality of transgression” (350). 66 For a related position, see Stackelberg (1980). 67 “The critical debate on the danger that the novel presents to readers seems to be an inevitable effect of the work. It prolongs the considerations of the characters, whether they are innocent or guilty, on the risks of writing and reading and on the pitfalls of language. The criticism often does nothing but perpetuate this debate, inherent to the novel, which is not the least of its ironies” (transl. and emphasis mine).

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Ambiguity on the level of the interpretation of the novel, taken as a whole, can thus be seen as a result of lower-level forms of ambiguity on the level of intradiegetic epistolary communication. Such diegetic ambiguities concern, first and foremost, the (interpretation of the) characters. Valmont’s ambiguity is pointed out explicitly by other characters of the diegetic universe. Merteuil reproaches him repeatedly for impersonating two personalities, the one libertine and crafty, the other sentimental and dumb. Consider, for instance, letter CLII: Au vrai, vous accepter tel que vous vous montrez aujourd’hui, ce serait vous faire une infidélité réelle. Ce ne serait pas là renouer avec mon ancien Amant; ce serait en prendre un nouveau, et qui ne vaut pas l’autre à beaucoup près. Je n’ai pas assez oublié le premier pour m’y tromper ainsi. Le Valmont que j’aimais était charmant. [. . .] je vous en prie, Vicomte, si vous le retrouvez, amenez-le-moi; celui-là sera toujours bien reçu. (LD, 360)68

Although Merteuil pursues her own aims by mirroring such an image to Valmont, she actually points to what makes Valmont indeed an ambiguous character: his being torn between libertinism and sentimentalism. As Delon puts it: “Valmont hésite entre une image de lui-même que lui renvoie le regard des salons et l’amour sincère dont il découvre la possibilité [. . .]”69 (1986, 64). Besides Merteuil, it is also Mme de Volanges who invokes the difficulty of distinguishing between what is true and what is fake about Valmont. See letter CLIV, addressed to Mme de Rosemonde: C’est une Lettre que j’ai reçue de M. de Valmont, à qui il a plu de me choisir pour sa confidente, et même pour sa médiatrice auprès de Mme de Tourvel, pour qui il avait aussi joint une Lettre à la mienne. [. . .] Mais que direz-vous de ce désespoir de M. de Valmont? D’abord faut-il y croire, ou veut-il seulement tromper tout le monde, et jusqu’à la fin? (LD, 362–363)70

68 “And, indeed, to receive you, as you exhibit yourself now, would be a downright act of infidelity: it would not be a renewal with my former lover; it would be taking a new one, many degrees inferior to him. I have not so soon forgot the first, to be deceived. The Valmont I loved was a charming fellow. [. . .] I beg, Viscount, if you find him, to bring him to me, he will always be well received” (DC, 158–159 [vol. IV]). 69 “Valmont hesitates between a self-concept that hinges either on his fame in the world of salons or on the sincere love whose possibility he has just begun to detect” (transl. mine). 70 “I have received a letter from M. de Valmont, who has been pleased to chuse me for a confident, and even his mediatrix with Mme de Tourvel, to whom he wrote under my cover. [. . .] What do you think of M. de Valmont’s distraction [désespoir, ESW]? Is it real, or does he mean to deceive the world to the last?” (DC, 164–165 [vol. IV]).

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According to René Pomeau, the deletion of the letter that Valmont addresses to Mme de Volanges71 serves the function of preserving the ambiguity of Valmont’s character in the eyes of the reader: Délibérément, jusqu’au terme du récit, Laclos fait en sorte que nous ne puissions porter un jugement définitif sur son personnage. La lettre à Mme de Volanges, présente dans le manuscrit, il la retranche du texte imprimé. N’a-t-il pas jugé que Valmont s’y exprimait (Pomeau 1993, 193–194) trop clairement? [. . .] Laclos a préféré maintenir l’équivoque.72

Valmont’s ambiguity is part of what Moravetz describes as a discursive “double codedness” according to which the “libertine discourse” is “affected” by the “love-passion discourse” (see 1990, 255). I think that this double-codedness also concerns Mme de Merteuil. Her true feelings remain enigmatic, but her rhetoric games and especially the energy that she invests in keeping Valmont within her system of libertine values and behaviours invite readers to speculate about the amorous sentiments that she could have for Valmont: “il est permis d’imaginer [. . .] une Marquise amoureuse malgré elle du Vicomte”73 (Delon 1986, 50). Warning (2007) concedes this possibility as well.74 Behind the “duplicity” of Merteuil (see Wolpe 1960, 35), understood as the contrast between her social mask and her deceitful nature, lurks a deeper ambiguity: the competition between her deceitful nature and the possibility of a more authentic, sentimental facet of her personality. Character ambiguity concerns not only the libertine protagonists, but also most of the other characters. Even a rather one-dimensional character, such as Tourvel, has been described as ambiguous.75 In this connection, it is useful to

71 The editor has inserted a note that explains the suppression of this letter: “Nothing having appeared in this correspondence that could resolve this doubt, we chose to suppress Valmont’s letter” (DC, 165 [vol. IV]). According to Delon, “[l]a note de la lettre CLIV souligne l’incertitude qui touche l’attitude de Valmont. ‘Faut-il croire à son désespoir ou veut-il tromper tout le monde jusqu’à la fin?’ Elle affiche l’ambiguïté du roman [. . .]” (1986, 89). 72 “Until the end of the narrative, Laclos intentionally prevents us from passing a definitive judgment on his character. He retracts the printed letter to Mme de Volanges, which is present in the manuscript. Didn’t he judge that Valmont expressed himself in it too clearly? [. . .] Laclos has preferred to maintain the ambiguity” (transl. mine). 73 “It is permitted to imagine [. . .] a Marchioness who is unwittingly in love with Valmont” (transl. mine). 74 “Denkbar also auch, daß Merteuil die ‘rupture’ [i.e. the end of her own, preceding liaison with Valmont, ESW] [. . .] als tiefe Verletzung erfahren hat, die erste Liaison also nicht im Zeichen eines illusionslosen ‘plaisir’ stand, sondern einer außerordentlichen Glückserfahrung, die sie jetzt in der Begegnung Valmont/Tourvel wiederholt sieht und die die Unerbittlichkeit ihres Vernichtungswillens plausibel macht” (Warning 2007, 401). 75 “Tourvel ist letztlich selbst ein eindrucksvolles Beispiel für die Dissimulation des amour-propre in der Maske der Tugend. Die Ambiguität ihres tugendhaften Charakters wird insbesondere in

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return to Moravetz’s analysis, based on Lotman’s (1977) model of plot. She claims that Les Liaisons dangereuses contrasts four semantic spaces or value systems, incorporated by different characters of the novel: the spaces of (i) virtue (the “official norm” of society), represented by Mme de Volanges (Moravetz 1990, 111) and Tourvel (124); (ii) libertinage, represented by Merteuil and Valmont (114–121); (iii) sensibility, represented by Tourvel, Danceny and Cécile (121–123); and of (iv) love-passion, a space that, as Moravetz argues, is occupied only after “transgressive” events, such as the break-down of Tourvel’s resistance against Valmont (see 123–124). According to Moravetz, the plot consists primarily of characters transgressing the borders of their respective socio-semantic spaces. Moravetz argues, for example, that Cécile and Danceny leave the space of sensibility not by entering the space of love-passion (why not?), but by their (social, epistolary and then even sexual) intercourse with the characters of the libertine space (126). One may wonder, at this point, whether the character ambiguity of Danceny does not exist even before (and thus independently) of the libertine intrigues. Delon points to a parallelism between the couples Valmont-Tourvel and Danceny-Cécile, which throws the shadow of libertinage on Danceny: Il [this parallelism, ESW] souligne un éventuel libertinage chez Danceny [. . .]. Le Vicomte remarque dans la lettre LVII: ‘Entre la conduite de Danceny avec la petite Volanges, et la mienne avec Mme de Tourvel, il n’y a que la différence du plus au moins’ [. . .]. Que penser des serments de Danceny quand ils sont parallèles à ceux de Valmont? (Delon 1986, 49–50)76

As Moravetz argues, Tourvel, for her part, leaves the space of virtue and enters the space of love-passion. The transgression of the libertines into the space of sensibility (or love-passion), however, is not clearly represented by the novel, thus remaining an ambivalent transgression (see 129). Moravetz’s analysis allows for the grouping of characters according to shared value systems, to structure the constellation of characters according to semantic axes (see Figure 15) and to understand developments in the diegetic universe in terms of these axes and socio-semantic movements. Her analysis presents, however, at least three disadvantages. Firstly, it alters Lotman’s model significantly in that the topological structures of the diegetic world are neglected (despite the fact

jenem Brief deutlich, in dem sie explizit die Unmöglichkeit ihrer Liebe zu Valmont zur Sprache bringt” (Friedrich 1998, 86). 76 “It [this parallelism, ESW] underlines a possible libertinism on the side of Danceny [. . .]. The Viscount remarks in letter LVII: ‘Between the behaviour of Danceny and the little Volanges, and mine with Mme de Volanges, the difference is only in degree’ [. . .]. What should we think about Danceny’s vows if they parallel Valmont’s?” (translation mine).

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that, in Lotman’s approach, they are intricately connected with semantic structures). Secondly, by modelling the relationship between the semantic spaces as transgressions and thus in terms of temporal change and successive states, Moravetz conceals an essential feature of character ambiguity: the characters incorporate contrasting positions simultaneously. Correspondingly, it is perhaps less the plot development that produces transgressions (which, for their part, create ambiguity) than it is, inversely, a universal, profound ambiguity (of characters, their motives and their relationships) that governs the diegetic developments. Thirdly, following the argument of Matzat (1992), one might object that Les Liaisons dangereuses ultimately does not narrate the clash of rivalling value systems. Although both Matzat and Moravetz identify contrasting ideological positions, Matzat restricts himself to the opposition of two value systems: libertine rationality versus love-virtue-sensibility. Moreover, while Moravetz conceptualises the relationship between value systems in terms of narrative transgressions, Matzat interprets them as participating in a “deconstructive dynamic”, which leads to the deconstruction of the ideological (op-)positions themselves. As a matter of fact, the ideological discourses prove to be helpless against the power of uncontainable affects (see Matzat 1992, 310).77 Matzat argues further that the opposition between the two value systems is replaced by another: that of (libertine, sensualist, virtue-oriented, etc.) theory versus experience (see Matzat 1992, 310), with the latter questioning the former. If enlightenment promotes theoretical ideals of rational insight and control, the narrative exploration of the tension between rationality and experientiality (as it happens in Les Liaisons dangereuses, but also in works written by Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau) indicates a second, counter- or metamovement of enlightenment: In der Entfaltung dieser Spannung zwischen Theorie und Erfahrung gehorchen die Liaions dangereuses einem zentralen Impuls aufklärerischen Denkens, hierin vergleichbar mit dem erzählerischen Werk Voltaires, Diderots und Rousseaus. Denn dort werden jeweils umfassende Systementwürfe mit Erfahrungen konfrontiert, die ihnen nicht gehorchen und damit das zentrale Projekt der Aufklärung, die theoretische Erklärbarkeit und die aus ihr resultier(Matzat 1992, 311) ende Beherrschbarkeit der Welt, in Frage gestellt wird.78

77 Warning (2007, 393–394) argues as well that the novel deconstructs the opposition between libertinage and sensibility and he even considers this interpretation to be noncontroversial. 78 “The narrative exploration of this tension between theory and experience is governed by a powerful impetus of Enlightenment philosophy. It can be compared, in this regard, with the narrative work of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. They narrate what happens when encompassing ideological systems of thought clash with experiences that do not fit their systematics and that therefore compromise the central concern of Enlightenment: the explicability of the world by means of theory and its controllability, which would come along with it” (translation mine).

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In the light of these considerations, one could say that the ambiguities of Laclos’s characters and of their value systems reveal a more fundamental ambiguity, specific to enlightenment: theory and experience, rationality and affect, perhaps even ideology and biology79 are co-present; they compete to direct human agency and to constitute the core of the human being. Earlier, we stated that ambiguity presupposes the idea of a norm from which an “ambiguous” phenomenon deviates. What norms underlie the ambiguities of Les Liaisons dangereuses? The ambiguity of theory and experience concerns human nature: the expectation, goal or norm that motivates the competition between rationality and affect consists of (grasping) the nature of the human being, that is, a core consistency instead of a duality. Correspondingly, the ambiguity of characters, such as Valmont or Tourvel, seems to rely on the expectation that characters have a core personality, which would give their behaviours and character traits coherence. This is why “one of the most discussed questions” (Friedrich 1998, 99) brought up by the novel is to know whether Valmont loves Tourvel or not. If he loves her, his core personality is not libertine; in this case, the novel would tell the story of a man who, having gone astray, has been brought back on the right path of sincerity by a virtuous women who sacrificed herself for him. If he does not love her, his core personality is libertine; in this case, the novel would tell the story of a man whose apparent change80 would be a means of vengeance against Merteuil, a way of showing her that “it is better to have [him] for a friend than an enemy” (DC, 183 [vol. IV, letter CLVIII]). Sabine Friedrich (1998, 99–100) argues that neither answer is susceptible of grasping Valmont’s core personality. In her eyes, there is no core personality behind Valmont’s rhetorical masks, but only an

79 Elaborating on the discourse on felicity (bonheur), peculiar to Enlightenment, Warning (2007, 377) explains that Diderot links the felicity of living beings to the satisfaction of their biological needs. One could consider the opposition of biology and ideology to be of importance for Laclos’s novel as well. For example, the fact that Valmont uses rhetorical means that blur the conceptual boundaries between the concepts of bonheur, tranquillité, amour and plaisir, in letter XLVIII, could be read as a strategy by which Tourvel’s resistance against a thiswordly, passionate conception of bonheur and amour, including a bodily (biological) component, should be broken. Sensualism, as a dominant movement of enlightenment, emphasises the link between physical-biological and mental facts as well. As Condillac puts it in the conclusion of his Traité des sensations: “toutes nos connoissances viennent des sens [. . .]. [. . .] il est raisonnable de conclure que [ . . . .] nos connoissances et nos passions sont l’effet des plaisirs et des peines qui accompagnent les impressions des sens” (see Condillac 1947, 313). 80 This change is insinuated by the letters he sends to Mme de Volanges, by his conciliation with Danceny and by the surrender of the “very voluminous papers” of his epistolary exchange (see DC, 195 [vol. IV, letter CLXIII]).

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amour-propre [self esteem], which produces various masks.81 By advancing this argument, however, Friedrich does argue in favour of a core personality behind Valmont’s masks, constituted, in compliance with moralistic conceptions of the human being, of amour-propre. Her argument thus exemplifies the extent to which the disambiguation of character ambiguity amounts to the reestablishment of an implicit norm of a core personality, able to homogenise character multiplicity.82 What is the norm against which the “deep” interpretative ambiguity of the entire novel stands out? Inasmuch as the research literature constantly emphasises the “continuous play within L.D. about what seems to be and what is” (Champagne 1974, 346) and the novel’s “access to opposed interpretations” (Todorov 1980, 36),83 the implicit norm from which Les Liaisons dangereuses apparently deviates is the possibility of mapping unequivocally what “seems to be” on “what is” (i.e. interpretative closure).84 The norm, aim or expectation of interpretative closure seems to be linked, on the one hand, to a specific concept of literariness85 according to which the multiplicity that constitutes literary texts can or should be homogenised, integrated, made coherent.86 On the other hand, the norm of interpretative closure reveals an epistemic attitude that 81 “Ebenso wie Valmont Tourvel gegenüber den empfindsamen Liebenden spielt, stilisiert er sich der Marquise gegenüber zu einem unterwürfigen, ihr treu ergebenen Diener. Wenn aber die unterschiedlichen Rollen vom amour-propre produziert werden, kann man nicht mehr zwischen dem authentischen Kern und der aufgesetzten Maske unterscheiden. Es besteht keine Differenz mehr zwischen Simulation und Eigentlichkeit. Hinter der leeren Maske verbirgt sich nicht das Wesen Valmonts. Es gibt nur eine Kette aneinandergereihter Masken, die die Identität des Libertins ausmachen” (Friedrich 1998, 100). 82 Following Warning, one could question the extent to which amour-propre is susceptible at all of providing Valmont with character homogeneity, since amour-propre is, from a moralistic perspective, itself a multiplicity: “Die Ironie Valmonts ist [. . .] nicht einfach dissimulatio seines amour-propre, sondern die dissimulatorische Komponente des in sich gespaltenen amour-propre. Der amour-propre dringt ein in den [. . .] art de bien écrire, er infiziert ihn dergestalt, daß ironische Distanzierung und insgeheime Faszination unentscheidbar werden” (2007, 397). 83 In the French original, Todorov calls it “cette ouverture vers des interprétations opposées” (Todorov 1966, 157). 84 The norm of interpretative closure implies embedded (lower-level) norms, for example the norm of causality, i.e. the possibility of mapping unequivocally diegetic causes on diegetic effects. 85 Jakobson holds that “any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation” (1988, 49, emphasis mine); proponents of the principle of interpretative closure go one step further: they assert that sequences of semantic units do build an equation (provided that one disposes of sufficient interpretative competences). 86 In cases where such interpretative coherence cannot be produced, for example because the multiplicity of the literary text presents too many inconsistencies, the only way of following the principle of interpretative closure consists of ascending on an interpretative meta-level, which

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contrasts with that advocated by the rhizome. As I have noted earlier (see section 1.5), the rhizome represents an epistemic dynamic according to which there is a lack of correspondence between two terms, as between the parts and the whole, or between form and function. The lack of correspondence between the parts and the whole corresponds to the interpretative (“polyphonic”) problem of homogenising the novel’s multiple voices and interpretative alternatives, of integrating them so as to form an unambiguous whole. The lack of correspondence between form and function, on the other hand, occurs in the novel insofar as one and the same linguistic form may indeed have very different meanings or functions. Consider, for example, the following sentence: “Ah! Madame, de grâce, n’abusez pas de votre empire! [. . .] vous parler encore, c’est vous donner contre moi de plus fortes armes; c’est me soumettre plus entièrement à votre volonté. Il est plus aisé de se défendre contre vos Lettres” (LD, 187, lettre LXXXIII).87 The meanings of such sentences, which Valmont addresses to Tourvel, are as diverse as Valmont’s “psychological ambiguity” (see Wolpe 1960, 41). The divergence between forms and functions corresponds to the often acknowledged divergence between diegetic (epistolary) semblances and their “true” counterparts, i.e. to the impossibility of mapping the former onto the latter. This divergence and impossibility withdraws any positively certifiable intradiegetic reality and replaces it by an interpretative dynamics that unfolds (in) a web of interdependent interpretative possibilities. Ces jeux de miroir et de contrepoint tendent à faire disparaître la notion même de réalité dans le tournoiement des points de vue, dans le tourniquet des apparences. Les intrigues des libertins peuvent être contaminées par le sentimentalisme et il est permis d’imaginer un Valmont épris malgré lui de Tourvel ou une Marquise amoureuse malgré elle du Vicomte. Inversement, le libertinage risque de jeter une suspicion sur tous les sentiments du roman et de réduire chacun à son égoïsme sensuel. [. . .] Toute réalité des sentiments, transcendant (Delon 1986, 50, emphasis mine) au texte, disparaît.88

interprets the text’s resistance against closure itself as a (homogenous, coherent) literary purpose or principle. I will discuss such strategies under the label of “the interpretative ascent” in chapter 6. 87 “Ah! for heaven’s sake, [. . .] do not abuse your power over me [. . .] Again to converse with you is furnishing you with stronger arms against me: it is submitting myself entirely to your will. It is easier to make a defense against your letters” (DC, 200–201 [vol. II, letter LXXXIII]). 88 “These counterpoint games of reflection aim at dissolving the notion of reality itself in the turmoil of points of view and in the turnstile of appearances. The machinations of the libertines can be contaminated by sentimentalism and it is permitted to imagine a Valmont who is unwittingly in love with Tourvel or a Marchioness unwittingly in love with Valmont. Conversely, libertinage is susceptible of bringing all feelings expressed in the novel under suspicion and of

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If, as Delon suggests, there is no intradiegetic reality transcending the textual form, then Laclos’s novel complies strongly with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome according to which “[t]here is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 4).89

4.3.3 Perspectival ambiguity: Narrative projection of viewpoints in letter XLVIII In this section, I will refer to a specific form of ambiguity that concerns the narratological category of perspective by engaging with letter XLVIII of Les Liaisons dangereuses. This section proceeds in five steps. I will start with a brief introduction to letter XLVIII by presenting shortly its context, its structure and some quotations. Secondly, I will provide a short survey on the most important interpretative insights into the letter. Thirdly, I will analyse how far narrative theories of perspective are able to describe the specificities of letter XLVIII, as they have been described by the research literature. This will lead me, fourthly, to an analysis of letter XLVIII as an example of “narrative projection”. Finally, I will discuss the possibility of using Hartner’s concept of multiperspectivity instead; in this connection, I will explore the differences between the two narratological concepts. 4.3.3.1 Introduction to letter XLVIII Shortly after having decided to make Tourvel his next victim, Valmont learns that Tourvel stays for some time at the country residence of his aunt (Mme de Rosemonde). Valmont takes up quarters there. Goaded by the unscrupulous Mme de Merteuil into prevailing over Tourvel’s virtue, Valmont makes use of the whole range of his manipulative strategies and ruses (including especially letterwriting) in order to sow the seeds of love in Tourvel’s soul – and he succeeds.

reducing each of these feelings to sensual egotism. [. . .]. Any emotional reality, understood as something that exists outside of the text, disappears” (translation mine). 89 If we conceptualise these ambiguities (and their corresponding norms) in terms of narrative projection, we find that the narrative syntagm of Les Liaisons dangereuses creates structures that overfill the conceptual slots of the corresponding generic (or transgeneric, i.e. literary) schema: several narrative ‘character’ frames compete for filling one and the same character slot of a generic schema of ‘narrative’ (e.g. Valmont-the-egomaniac versus Valmont-the-passionate, or Danceny-the-sentimental versus Danceny-the-little-libertine). Concerning the overall interpretation of the novel, several narrative interpretative ‘meaning’ frames compete for filling one and the same conceptual ‘meaning’ slot of a transgeneric schema of ‘literature’.

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Tourvel feels increasingly torn between the love and longing that grows within her soul and the voices of her conscience, which remind her of Christian morality and conjugal faith. Tourvel begs him to prove his alleged love by leaving his aunt’s residence in order to free her from the burden of his constant presence. Valmont does not fail to seize this opportunity to fortify Tourvel’s germinating belief into the authenticity of his love and actually goes back to Paris. Back in Paris, his first deed consists of a libidinous night with Émilie, a prostitute with whom he is well familiar. During this night, he writes an (as always) highly manipulative letter to Tourvel (letter XLVIII), using in fact Émilie’s body as his table. Valmont encloses it in a letter for Merteuil (letter XLVII) and asks this secret, second addressee to “[r]ead it, seal it, and send it there” (DC, 231 [vol. I]). In the letter addressed to Merteuil, he describes the circumstances under which the letter has been written – a letter “à ma belle Dévote, à qui j’ai trouvé plaisant d’envoyer une Lettre écrite du lit et Presque d’entre les bras d’une fille, interrompue même pour une infidélité complète, et dans laquelle je lui rends un compte exact de ma situation et de ma conduite” (LD, 101, lettre XLVII).90 Valmont also describes both Émilie’s reaction to the letter (she was thus the first to read it) and the effect that the letter is – allegedly 91 – supposed to have on Merteuil herself (“Émilie, qui a lu l’Épître, en a ri comme une folle, et j’espère que vous en rirez aussi”, LD, 101, lettre XLVII).92 Tourvel will thus only be the third reader – and the only one who knows neither about the letter’s circulation nor about the circumstances of its redaction. Let us consider some of the most insightful passages of the first part of this letter, which will be considered in more detail further below: C’est après une nuit orageuse, et pendant laquelle je n’ai pas fermé l’œil; c’est après avoir été sans cesse [. . .] dans l’agitation d’une ardeur dévorante [. . .] que je viens chercher auprès de vous, Madame, un calme dont j’ai besoin [. . .] En effet, la situation où je suis en

90 That is, a letter to his “lovely devotee, to whom it struck me as a pleasant thought, to write in bed with, and almost in the arms of, a girl, where I was interrupted by a complete infidelity. In this letter, I give her an exact account of my conduct and situation” (DC, 231 [vol. I]). 91 Inasmuch as the two libertines tend to use “addressed language” (see section 4.3.1), every sentence has potentially a manipulative dimension. If one takes the extreme competition between Valmont and Merteuil into consideration, i.e. the “series of abortive attempts by each to establish a superiority over the other” (Rosbottom 1978, 203), it seems rather implausible that Valmont only intends to make Merteuil laugh. Bourgeacq (1980, 183, 186) points out that Valmont wishes to prove his rhetorical skills to Merteuil and even uses letter XLVIII to take revenge on Merteuil. The letter can be interpreted as a response to the description of her sexual experiences with the Chevalier inasmuch as it puts her in a passive, voyeuristic position, making her a witness of the libertine adventures that emerge from between the lines. 92 “Emily, who read the epistle, laughed immoderately, and I expect it will make you laugh also” (DC, 231 [vol. I]).

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vous écrivant, me fait connaître, plus que jamais, la puissance irrésistible de l’amour; j’ai peine à conserver assez d’empire sur moi pour mettre quelque ordre dans mes idées; et déjà je prévois que je ne finirai pas cette Lettre, sans être obligé de l’interrompre. Quoi! ne puis-je donc espérer que vous partagerez quelque jour le trouble que j’éprouve en ce moment ? [. . .] Croyez-moi, Madame, la froide tranquillité, le sommeil de l’âme, [. . .] ne mènent point au bonheur; les passions actives peuvent seules y conduire; [. . .] je crois pouvoir assurer sans crainte, que, dans ce moment, je suis plus heureux que vous [. . .] Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant; jamais je ne ressentis, dans cette occupation, une émotion si douce, et cependant si vive. Tout semble augmenter mes transports: l’air que je respire est brûlant de volupté; la table même sur laquelle je vous écris, consacrée pour la première fois à cet usage, devient pour moi l’autel sacré de l’amour [. . .] Je devrais peut-être m’abandonner moins à des transports que vous ne partagez pas: il faut vous quitter un moment pour dissiper une ivresse qui s’augmente à chaque instant, et qui devient plus forte que moi. (LD, 102–103, lettre XLVIII)93

The letter can be divided into five parts, with a caesura between the third and the fourth part. In the first part,94 Valmont describes himself as being in a state of agitation. This self-description is followed by two sentences95 that represent the transition to the second part. These sentences shift the focus from Valmont

93 “It is after a very stormy night, during which I have not closed my eyes; it is after having been in incessant agitations [. . .] [that] I come to you, Madam, to seek the calm I so much stand in need of [. . .]; [. . .] for the situation I now write in, convinces me more than ever of the irresistible power of love: I can hardly preserve command over myself, to arrange my ideas in any order; and I already foresee that I shall not be able to finish this letter, without being obliged to break off. What! cannot I then hope that you will one day experience the emotions I do at this moment! [. . .] Believe me, Madam, settled tranquillity, the sleep of the soul, [. . .] does not lead to happiness; the active passions alone lead the way; [. . .] I may, I think, assure myself, that I am this moment happier than you [. . .] Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you. Never did I feel in this pleasing employment so sweet, so lively an emotion! Everything conspires to raise my transports! The very air I breathe wafts me luxurious pleasure; even the table I write on, now, for the first time, consecrated by me to that use, becomes to me a sacred altar of love; [. . .] I ought, perhaps, to moderate transports you do not share in. I must leave you a moment to dissipate a phrenzy which I find growing upon me: I find it too strong for me.” (DC, 233–236 [vol. I]) 94 The first part extends from the very beginning (“C’est après une nuit orageuse [. . .]”, LD, 102; “It is after a very stormy night”, DC, 233 [vol. I]) to right before the first exclamation (“[. . .] sans être oblige de l’interrompre”, LD, 102; “[. . .] without being obliged to break off”, DC, 233–234 [vol. I]). 95 “Quoi! ne puis–je donc espérer que vous partagerez quelque jour le trouble que j’éprouve en ce moment? J’ose croire cependant que, si vous le connaissiez bien, vous n’y seriez pas entièrement insensible” (LD, 102–103) (“What! cannot I then hope that you will one day experience the emotions I do at this moment! I may venture, however, to assert, that if you thoroughly experienced such emotions, you could not be totally insensible to them” [DC, 234, vol. I]).

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himself to Tourvel, imagining her in his present state of agitation. The second part96 creates an opposition between her moral rules and the alleged authentic feelings of Valmont and/or Tourvel (froide tranquillité versus passions actives97; mortel état de sommeil de l’âme versus état heureux98; désespoir versus délire99). The third part100 synthesises the opposing positions. More precisely, it provides an account of Valmont’s emotional state, which combines elements of the two standpoints: a combination of erotic and quasi-religious feelings (brûlant de volupté101 and ivresse; l’autel sacré de l’amour and serment)102 as well as of impetuosity and sensibility (émotion si douce et cependant si vive103). The fourth part104 represents Valmont as finding himself in a pitiful state of exhaustion and resignation, whilst the fifth and last part portrays his relationship to Tourvel in terms of hope (for her indulgence), dependence (from her benevolence) and respect (whose object is Tourvel, but whose subject is not Valmont, but – by metonymy – his love105 ).

96 The second part goes from “Croyez-moi, Madame” (LD, 103) (“Believe me, Madam”, DC, 234 [vol. I]) to “l’exil auquel vous me condamnez” (LD, 103) (“the exile to which you have condemned me”, DC, 234 [vol. I]). 97 “Settled tranquillity” versus “active passions”. It should be noted that the French original associates tranquillity with the idea of coldness. 98 “Death”-like state of the “sleeping” soul versus happiness. 99 “Despair” versus “delirium”. 100 The third part begins with “Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant” (LD, 103) (“Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you”; DC, 234 [vol. I]). It ends with a caesura, constituted by the interruption of the redaction of the letter due to what Valmont calls, in letter XLVII, “une infidélité complete” (“a complete infidelity”). The last words of the third part are “plus forte que moi” (LD, 103) (“too strong for me”, DC, 235 [vol. I]). 101 The expression “brûlant de volupté” can be found in the 2002 edition (2002, 157). The edition from 1951 offers the less dramatic expression “plein de volupté” (LD, 103). 102 On the erotic side, we find expressions such as “luxurious pleasure” and “phrenzy”; a religious dimension is present through words such as “sacred altar of love” or “oath”. 103 In the English translation (“so sweet, so lively an emotion”), the synthetic aspect is less obvious, especially because the word cependant (yet) of the French original does not find entrance into the English version. 104 The fourth part starts with “Je reviens à vous” (LD, 103) (“I return to you”, DC, 235 [vol. I]) and ends with “le regret d’en être privé” (LD, 103) (“regret at being deprived of them”, DC, 236 [vol. I]). 105 “[J]amais mon amour ne fut plus respectueux” (LD, 103). The English translation replaces love with passion, thus making even more evident than the French original that Valmont tries to think together two inconsistent attitudes: “my passion was never more respectful” (DC, 236 [vol. I]).

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4.3.3.2 Interpretative insights from the research literature The research literature has emphasised repeatedly the ambiguity of this letter. George May describes it as an “extended series of ambivalent statements” and as a “long series of double meanings” (1963, 182). According to May, this ambiguity complies, firstly, with “the rather large role played by double-entendre in Laclos’ novel” (183); secondly, with “the dual nature of Valmont’s personality” (187) – i.e. with his “pervasive duplicity” (186) – and, thirdly, with literariness (or, respectively, with the literary value of Valmont’s letters): “words with double meaning probably are the most literary as well as the most sophisticated” (183). In a similar vein, Bourgeacq considers the letter to pose “the question of double meaning” (“question de double sense”, 1980, 180) and identifies a “plurality of messages [contained] within a single text” (“la pluralité des messages en un seul texte”, 180), namely messages designed to be understood by Tourvel, Merteuil and Émilie. Michel Delon, who describes the letter as a “message à double entente” [equivocal message], even identifies four recipients (“Un jeu épistolaire, avec son quadruple destinataire”, 1986, 120) as he also counts the reader, who “has to be consecutively Tourvel, Émilie, Merteuil, and appreciate the virtuosity of Valmont, that is, through the character, that of the narrator” (120, translation mine). Additionally, Delon points out that the reader knows about Valmont’s falling in love with Tourvel. Considered from this readerly perspective, Émilie serves as a surrogate object of Valmont’s desire for Tourvel (119). But what is concretely the specific nature of the ambiguity of letter XLVIII? Delon suggests that it consists of an oscillation between spiritual and physical love, which triggers processes of (de-)metaphorisation (see Delon 1986, 120). This engagement with metaphorical meaning is dependent upon the respective (diegetic) readers of the letter and their respective (in-)ability to decipher the letter’s second level of meaning – “polysémie [. . .] fait prendre à la Présidente table au sens propre et autel sacré de l’amour en son sens figuré, mais fait comprendre à Merteuil table comme métaphore et autel sacré de l’amour en un sens tout à fait concret”106 (119). This continuous ambiguity is based upon the use of words that are ambivalent either by themselves (insensible [insensible], amour [love]) or in terms of the situation in which Valmont writes the letter (table [table], autel sacré de l’amour [sacred altar of love], transports [transports]). Additionally, Delon examines the two-fold structure of the letter. The first part of the letter displays a growing desire, a strategy used to evoke feelings in

106 “[P]olysemy [. . .] makes the Présidente read table in the literal sense of the word and sacred altar of love in the figural sense, but makes Merteuil understand table as a metaphor and sacred altar of love in a perfectly concrete sense” (transl. mine).

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Tourvel; the second paragraph represents a melancholic counterpart, which should arouse compassion in the addressee. The caesura between them is constituted by the “complete infidelity” that Valmont commits with Émilie.107 In the course of the letter, Valmont opposes two life models: that of Tourvel (based on tranquillity and peace of mind) and that of Valmont himself (movement, passion). Simultaneously, Valmont derides this opposition by the way he blends it with his actual situation: “Valmont s’amuse de cette opposition et confond sciemment le calme vanté par sa correspondante avec le sommeil dont il a besoin pour récupérer”108 (Delon 1986, 118). Bourgeacq (1980) highlights, first of all, the very fact that Valmont integrates different messages, dedicated to different readers, into one and the same text: “Il écrira, en une seule et même forme, et ce qu’il sent et ce qu’il ne sent pas; à l’une ce qu’il sent pour une autre. Il utilisera les mêmes mots, le même texte, pour énoncer plusieurs messages”109 (1980, 180, orig. emphasis deleted). Bourgeacq then explores the content of these messages. Tourvel, as the first addressee, should interpret the difference between the two parts of the letter as a sign of frustration, caused by Valmont’s alleged incapacity to calm his passion for her. Bourgeacq emphasises the ironic quality of the caesura, which develops through the fact that it is intended to trigger an interpretation that is absolutely contrary to its actual meaning: in reality, Valmont abandons himself completely to his desire, but what in reality is debauchery appears to Tourvel to be self-mastery (182). As to the message dedicated to Merteuil, Bourgeacq emphasises, just as Delon, that it is the perspective of Merteuil that unleashes the ambiguity of the two levels of meaning (“‘Tourvel/fantasmes érotiques’” versus “la réalité d’Emilie/ jouissance physique’”,110 Bourgeacq 1980, 182). It is Merteuil who should discover moreover finer-grained rhetorical strategies, brought about by this ambiguity, which Valmont uses in order to lower the conceptual defence of Tourvel.

107 According to Michel Butor, “ce qu’il y a de plus surprenant dans la fameuse lettre de Valmont à la présidente de Tourvel, [. . .] ce n’est pas qu’il l’ait ‘interrompue pour une infidélité complète’, [. . .] c’est que, dans son lit et presque dans ses bras [de ceux d’Émilie, ESW], il ait commencé par la lettre, et l’infidélité consommée, qu’il n’ait rien eu de plus pressé que de se remettre à écrire” (1964b, 150). 108 “Valmont amuses himself to exploit this opposition by deliberately confounding the calm praised by his correspondent with the sleep that he needs in order to recharge his batteries” (transl. mine). My analysis in section 4.3.4 builds on Delon’s insights, but goes one step further. 109 “He will write, by means of one and the same wording, both what he feels and what he does not feel; tell the one what he feels for the other. He will use the same words, the same text, to send several messages” (transl. mine). 110 “Tourvel/erotic fantasies” versus “the reality of Emily/physical pleasure” (transl. mine).

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Valmont destroys the dichotomy between bonheur [felicity] and plaisir [pleasure], which is a cornerstone of Tourvel’s moral system, by an exploitation of the ambivalence of amour [love]. Also the expression “Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant” [Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you], chosen instead of “[. . .] à vous écrire”, is due to Merteuil as the intended reader. She is supposed to understand the covert message of this subtle modification: never before did he experience so much (bodily) pleasure while simultaneously writing to Tourvel (and not: because of him writing to Tourvel; see Bourgeacq 1980, 183). The same holds true for the use of specific words and entire sentences that evoke his actual situation and actions (e.g., the feminine noun “table” instead of the masculine “pupitre”; “dissiper une ivresse” [dissipate a phrenzy], see 184). Thirdly, there is a message conveyed to Émilie. Bourgeacq argues that the letter entails a number of hints according to which Émilie’s role in the situation is not restricted to serving as a table, but involves a more active role. As to the first paragraph, the train of thought, the key words used (e. g. augmenter [growing]) as well as the processual change of syntactic-rhythmic properties and of punctuation indicate that Émilie contributes actively to Valmont’s erotic feelings (see 186–187). The second paragraph points to a potential divergence between Valmont’s exhaustion and Émilie’s insatiability (see 187). The letter is thus also addressed to Émilie, the only one who is fully able to understand the sexual allusions of Valmont. The ambiguity of the letter is considered to arise from the knowledge of the outerdiegetic reader about the letter being received by three diegetic characters in total. It is the perspectives of each of these three diegetic readers due to which the three different “layers”111 of meaning in the letter emerge. 4.3.3.3 Theories of narrative perspective How far are narrative theories of perspective able to account for the letter’s characteristics? I intentionally speak of theories in the plural, because narratology has presented a variety of ways of conceptualising narrative perspective, which manifest themselves in a bundle of different labels, such as point of view, focalisation, viewpoint or multiperspectivity. Reconstructing this debate would clearly exceed the confines of this chapter. Nonetheless, it seems necessary to

111 Rousset describes the general importance of “messages à double entente” in the novel. Significantly, he conceptualises such ambiguous messages as levels (or layers) of meaning: “Lire sous les mots, c’est le talent que Laclos donne à ses pirates, tout en le refusant aux innocents qui sont des rédacteurs – et des lecteurs – du premier niveau de sens, donc naïfs, donc manipulés” (1983, 95). The importance of this metaphor will be illuminated in section 4.3.3.5.

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introduce the debate that surrounds these terms in order to explore the potential of the different theories used to describe the ambiguity of letter XLVIII. Genette developed the term focalisation against the backdrop of the older labels of perspective and point of view, primarily in order to clear up “a regrettable confusion between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator? – or, more simply, the question who sees? And the question who speaks?” (Genette 1980, 186, orig. emphasis). Genette offers a three-fold typology that consists of zero, internal and external focalisation: The first term [zero focalization] corresponds to what English-language criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon ‘vision from behind’, and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows). In the second term [internal focalization112 ], Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows); this is the narrative with ‘point of view’ after Lubbock, or with ‘restricted field’ after Blin; Pouillon calls it ‘vision with’. In the third term [external focalization], Narrator < Character (the narrator says less than the character knows); this is the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative, what Pouillon calls ‘vision from without’. (Genette 1980, 188–189.)113

In the light of this classification, letter XLVIII could be analysed as a form of internal focalisation, inasmuch as there is, strictly speaking, no narrator in the novel, but only Valmont expressing himself. It is through his eyes (and ink) that we enter the diegetic world. Genette also gives thought to the focalisation of epistolary novels as presenting a form of “multiple” internal focalisation: “the same event may be evoked several times according to the point of view of several letter-writing characters” (190). What is not covered by Genette’s “multiple” internal focalisation, however, is the case of a single letter cuing readers to read it from more than one perspective. Genette does not devote much attention to such readerly effects since his concept of focalisation is primarily anchored in textuality. He proposes to define internal focalisation via “the possibility of rewriting the narrative section under consideration into the first person (if it is not in that person already) without the need for ‘any alteration of the discourse other than the change of grammatical pronouns’” (Genette 1980, 193), thereby adopting a criterion presented by Barthes.

112 As Genette adds, internal focalisation can be found in a “fixed”, a “variable” or in a “multiple” form (see Genette 1980, 189). 113 Furthermore, Genette highlights that focalisation “does not [. . .] always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section, which can be very short” (1980, 191).

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Using Iser’s framework (see section 3.1.4), one can say that Genette’s structuralist concept of focalisation is clearly located only at the textual pole of the literary “work of art”. Genette admonishes readers explicitly against shifting entirely to the pole of the reader, maintaining that “we should not confuse the information given by a focalized narrative with the interpretation the reader is called on to give of it (or that he gives it without being invited to it)” (197).114 Such a textual conception of focalisation115 is obviously incapable of accounting for what researchers consider to be the crucial characteristic of letter XLVIII: its ambiguity, i.e. the fact that it cognitively activates internal perspectives other than those of the epistolary author. Moreover, the simultaneity of several actualised perspectives is crucial to the coherence in progress performed by readers. Coherence in progress, for its part, is crucial for narrativity (narrative understanding and appreciation116) to arise. The importance of this connection between the novel’s (i) ambiguity, (ii) simultaneity of perspectives and (iii) coherence in progress – the gestaltforming interconnection of the “narrative spaces” (Dancygier 2012b) of the novel – is highlighted by Bourgeacq’s concluding remarks on letter XLVIII: Par son extrême densité la lettre XLVIII, dans laquelle épisodes se reflètent et répliques se font écho, suggère la nécessité d’une lecture attentive du texte intégral des Liaisons dangereuses dans ses moindres détails. Une telle lecture [. . .] ne manquerait pas d’élucider [. . .]

114 As Genette explains, internally focalised characters – such as Marcel in A la recherche du temps perdu – can perceive details that are meaningless for themselves at that point of the plot, but that are charged with interpretative meaning for the narrator (like for Marcel-thenarrator) or for the reader. 115 Despite the orientation of Genette’s focalisation on the textual pole, Genette takes the role of the reader to some extent into consideration. He explains that the identification of a specific type of focalisation actually depends on the question of knowing on which character the observer (i.e., the reader or researcher) focuses: “External focalization with respect to one character could sometimes just as well be defined as internal focalization through another: external focalization on Phileas Fogg is just as well internal focalization through Passepartout dumbfounded by his new master [. . .]” (Genette 1980, 191). As a result, “the distinction between different points of view is not always as clear as the consideration of pure types alone could lead one to believe” (191). According to Genette, this dependence of classification on the focus of the observer provides narrative mood with a certain “ambivalence (or reversibility)” (192). This ambivalence can serve as a link to my analysis of the ambiguity of letter XLVIII, since whether readers adopt the (complex) internal stance of the author Valmont (which anyway requires readers to reach beyond the textual surface), of the addressee Tourvel, or of both depends indeed on the reader’s focus. 116 Remember that, according to Delon, the reader has to appreciate the virtuosity of Valmont and/or of the narrator (1986, 120).

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une trame étroite où s’affinerait davantage la psychologie des personnages et s’affirmerait (Bourgeacq 1980, 188, emphasis mine) l’unité du roman.117

The “unity of the novel” means the final cognitive gestalt (resultative coherence) that arises out of the establishment of connections between narrative spaces (“épisodes se reflètent répliques se font écho”), these narrative spaces being compressed or condensed in letter XLVIII (“son extrême densité”). Compactness, density or compression, for their part, are one of the crucial characteristics of ambiguity.118 Letter XLVIII can thus be better explained by less text-centred and more cognition-based theories of perspective, such as those presented by Nünning (2001), Herman (2009b), Sweetser (2012) or Hartner (2012). Nünning proposes a “constructivist”119 approach according to which “the notion of perspective is applicable not only to the rhetorical structure of narrative transmission, but [. . .] to the description of the [. . .] world-models of the fictional individuals that populate the represented universe projected by narrative texts” (2001, 207). In his model, perspective is understood as “a character’s or a narrator’s subjective worldview”, “conditioned by the individual’s knowledge, mental traits, attitudes, and system of values” (206–207). He distinguishes three forms of perspective: (i) Narrator-perspective, defined as “the system of preconditions or the subjective worldview of a narrating instance” (212). (This type of perspective is not of interest for an analysis of Laclos’s novel, since there is, strictly speaking, no narrating instance – only the rédacteur and the éditeur.) (ii) Character-perspective, i.e. “an individual’s fictional system of preconditions or subjective worldview – the sum of all the models he or she has constructed of the world, of others, and of herself” (211). Two aspects seem especially important about this concept. Firstly, it conceptualises the diegetic

117 “It is by means of its extreme density that letter XLVIII, in which episodes reverberate and responses resonate, suggests the necessity of an attentive reading of the complete text of Dangerous Connections, with its tiniest details. Such a reading [. . .] would not fail to illuminate [. . .] a densely woven plot in which the psychology of the characters would become even more refined and in which the unity of the novel would manifest itself” (transl. and emphasis mine). 118 See my remarks on that subject in sections 4.1.3, 4.1.6, 4.3. 119 As Nünning explains, “[c]onstructivism proceeds from the radical and somewhat counterintuitive assumption that human beings do not have access to an objective reality and that they cannot know anything that lies outside their subjective cognitive domains” (2001, 209). According to Nünning, constructivism can be useful for narratology inasmuch as “[n]arrative fiction [. . .] thematises and structurally reflects the problems attached to the construction of world-models” (209).

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world as a non-homogenous entity insofar as each of the subjective character-perspectives organises the constituents of the diegetic world into a different world-model (see 211). Secondly, it highlights the fact that “cognitive domains of characters contain not just a general world-model, but also models of others and of themselves” (212). Both aspects are crucial for the theorisation of letter XLVIII, which cues readers to explore the inconsistency between different character-perspectives – between what happens, on a conceptual and on an emotional level, in Valmont, Tourvel, Merteuil and Émilie as they read (and compose) the letter. It is important, in this connection, that the conceptual level includes models of other characters and their worldviews. (iii) Perspective structure. Nünning understands the perspective structure as “the relationships between the various individual perspectives projected in a text” (209) and therefore as a cognitive entity that emerges through complex processes of coherence in progress.120 I would like to draw attention to two important facets of Nünning’s perspective structure. Firstly, according to Nünning, the perspective structure “has both paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions” (215), the former being related to “the selection of the individual perspectives” (215), the latter to the syntagmatic combination and coordination of the individual (character- and narrator-)perspectives. This idea complies with my proposition to use a model based on the opposition between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes; it supports the view that these two axes are relevant to perspectival problems. Letter XLVIII challenges the reader either to select a dominant character-perspective from which s/he reads the letter or to get along with the co-presence of several character-perspectives. Secondly, Nünning’s perspective structure draws on the construction of “the main opposing features between the characterperspectives”, i.e. of a “pattern of contrasts and correspondences” (216). This is a second, important point, because the narrativity of letter XLVIII lives by perspectival contrasts (especially between Valmont’s and Tourvel’s perspectives). Other theories, however, downplay the significance of perspectival contrasts (see Hartner 2012, 169–175). Concerning semantic oppositions, there is an overlap between Nünning’s perspective structure and theories of ambiguity. Just as Empson analyses forms of ambiguity according to a scale or continuum of increasing dissonance

120 As Nünning explains, “such a structure is not inherent in a narrative text, but rather construed by the individual reader. [. . .] The perspective structure of a text is thus realized in the reading process” (2001, 214, emphasis mine).

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between the different meanings implied by one and the same form, Nünning maintains that “the degree of homogeneity or intersubjectivity that the various perspectives display must be taken into consideration” (217). Now consider the ambiguity of letter XLVIII: it implies a great dissonance between the different perspectives actualised by one and the same epistolary text; there is little doubt that it is this fact that makes it such a famous piece of literature – literariness, for its part, being obviously linked to ambiguity. Herman’s theory overlaps with Nünning’s in that he proposes “a cognitively grounded approach to the problem of perspective” (2009b, 120); the two move “from talk of focalization to talk of conceptualization” (121). Herman claims “that narrative perspective is best understood as a reflex of the mind or minds conceptualizing scenes within storyworlds” (122). As the emphasis on the conceptualisation of “scenes” suggests, Herman does, however, not define perspective as extensively as Nünning does, since Herman restricts his concept of perspective to the conceptualisation of perceptions (instead of “world views”). Moreover, he anchors his approach in embodiment theory. For him, “the question is how the perspectival structure of embodied human experience finds reflexes in sign systems of all kinds” (139). He emphasises the different components of embodied (perceptual) perspective, inter alia temporal and spatial deixis (131). Obviously, Nünning’s broader, conceptual notion of perspective lends itself better than Herman’s to an analysis of the way in which letter XLVIII confronts the conceptual worlds (ideologies, emotions and so forth) of Valmont and his three readers. Perceptual and conceptual notions of perspective do, however, not necessarily contradict each other, since they can be considered to be different facets of narrative perspective. This has been made clear by Uspensky’s “compositional” approach, according to which point of view is composed by different dimensions. He argues that [. . .] we may consider point of view as an ideological and evaluative position; we may consider it as a spatial and temporal position of the one who produces the description of the events [. . .]; we may study it with respect to perceptual characteristics; or we may study it in a purely linguistic sense (as, for example, it relates to such phenomena as quasi-direct discourse); and so forth. [. . .] specifically, we will distinguish in our analysis [. . .] the planes of investigation in terms of which point of view may be fixed. For our purpose, these planes will be designated as the plane of ideology, the plane of phraseology, the spatial and temporal plane, and the psychological plane. (Uspensky 1973, 5–6)

In a similar vein, Schmid (2010) distinguishes five perspectival “parameters”: (i) spatial point of view, (ii) ideological point of view, (iii) temporal point of view, (iv) linguistic point of view and (v) perceptual point of view. Schmid constrasts

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narratorial (i.e. narrator-perspective) and figural (character-perspective) point of view and emphasises that not all of the different parameters need to pertain to one and the same narratorial or figural perspective.121 Such compositional models of perspective allow one to specify the various ways in which the different perspectives, which can be cognitively activated by letter XLVIII, contrast with each other. Since Émilie is present as Valmont composes the letter, she shares the temporal and spatial coordinates of his perspective and has the best understanding of the sexual level of meaning. Merteuil’s reading of the letter precedes Tourvel’s reading of it and this temporal dimension of her perspective corresponds to her epistemic stance,122 which is superior to that of Tourvel, who is not aware of the metaphorical games at all. The psychological (conceptual, ideological, emotional) component of viewpoint, for its part, could again be subdivided into a number of individual components. Briefly, the clashing viewpoints of the four characters produce a large number of contrasts on the psychological and on other planes. What is emphasised by the simultaneity of the different viewpoints of letter XLVIII is the intersubjective component of viewpoint, which has been highlighted by Sweetser. Sweetser contends that “linguistic structure shows no way entirely out of viewpoint to an objective pre-experiential description of the world” (2012, 1), since viewpoint is essential to our embodied, cognising and communicating selves. According to her argument, viewpoints are built into language and can therefore be analysed according to linguistic markers. “We shall label as linguistic viewpoint all the different ways that content is linguistically presented and construed differently” (4). According to Sweetser, this linguistic viewpoint depends on a variety of factors, inter alia the spatial123 and temporal124 deixis of the sender and the addressee as well as all the epistemic,125 emotive or evaluative126 elements that pertain to the mental spaces of the sender and the addressee.

121 Schmid (2010, 116) proposes to speak of a “compact” point of view if all parameters are consistently ascribable to one specific perspective. If the parameters have different perspectival sources, point of view is “diffuse”. If there are no clues in the text that allow a specific parameter to be ascribed either to a character or to a narrator, point of view is “neutralised”. 122 What I call “epistemic stance” here could be considered as a part of the psychological or conceptual dimension of viewpoint. 123 “Where the Speaker and Addressee are assumed to be, and what they are thought of as being able to see, to be able to reach, and so on” (Sweetser 2012, 4). 124 “When the Speaker and Addressee are assumed to be” (Sweetser 2012, 4). 125 “What the Speaker and Addressee are assumed to know, think, presuppose, and be able to calculate mentally about whatever mental space is involved” (Sweetser 2012, 5). 126 “What the Speaker and Addressee feel about the contents of the relevant spaces – how they evaluate them affectively, culturally, and so on” (Sweetser 2012, 5).

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Mental spaces play a crucial role in her approach inasmuch as “any linguistic form choice is evidence concerning some mental space – and hence about the relevant cognizer’s viewpoint” (7, emphasis mine). If, for example, the question “Can you come to my party?” is – grammatically correctly – answered with the sentence “Sure, I’d love to come” (instead of: “Sure, I’d love to go”), the use of the verb “to come”, which corresponds actually to the spatial deixis of the interrogator, shows that the speaker assumes the viewpoint of his/her interlocutor. Viewpoint has thus an intersubjective, social127 component: Collectively, the linguistic data suggest that we should be thinking in general of viewpoint as an intersubjective phenomenon [. . .], rather than as a unitary first-person phenomenon – that is, addressees’ and others’ viewpoints are always relevant, along with the speaker’s own viewpoint, in contributing to the speaker’s choice of linguistically expressed viewpoint. (Sweetser 2012, 12)

This position is consistent with Nünning’s claim according to which “cognitive domains of characters contain [. . .] models of others and of themselves” (212), although Sweetser puts emphasis more explicitly on perspectival intersubjectivity128 and thus on multiperspectivity.129 The importance of this aspect can be illustrated by letter LXXXVII, written by Merteuil to Madame de Volanges. In this letter, Merteuil tells a story about what she wants her addressee (and the whole society) to believe has happened recently between her and Prévan. In reality, Merteuil has tricked Prévan. She has invited him to visit her clandestinely at night, holding out the prospect of a sexual adventure. As he shows up in her bed-chamber, she indeed rings all bells, making everybody believe that the man is a lecher who has approached her against her will. This is how her letter begins: Je vous écris de mon lit, ma chère bonne amie. L’événement le plus désagréable, et le plus impossible à prévoir, m’a rendue malade de saisissement et de chagrin. Ce n’est pas

127 Consider, as another example, a public conference where a professor introduces a wellknown colleague, whom s/he ordinarily calls by her first name, as “Professor x”. This grammatical choice is “intersubjectively [. . .] indexical not only of the relationship between the speaker and the referent, but also of the relationship between the hearer(s) and the referent, which may dominate in determining the choice” (Sweetser 2012, 11). 128 “Many [. . .] forms might better be analyzed as in some way negotiating Speaker and Hearer viewpoints, more in line with Verhagen’s [. . .] intersubjectivity than with the hypothesis that they simply mark Speaker viewpoint” (Sweetser 2012, 6). 129 “Even more interestingly, we are not just capable of multiple viewpoints; we are in fact incapable of keeping to one single viewpoint of space, or of cognitive structure, when other humans are present. A situation involving multiple humans is necessarily structured, for participants and for human observers, via complex multiple viewpoints” (Sweetser 2012, 2).

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qu’assurément j’aie rien à me reprocher: mais il est toujours si pénible pour une femme honnête et qui conserve la modestie convenable à son sexe, de fixer sur elle l’attention publique, que je donnerais tout au monde pour avoir pu éviter cette malheureuse aventure [. . .]. (LD, 200, lettre LXXXVII)130

The art of Merteuil’s letter relies on her ability to adopt the moral viewpoint of her addressee (who lives the kind of virtuous life that Merteuil only feigns). She relates a story about the incident, which is consistently pervaded by Madame de Volanges’s ethical stance. Merteuil’s strategy requires, on the one hand, that she has an adequate mental model of Madame de Volanges (including her moral and behavioural principles) and, on the other hand, that she is able to perform a deictic shift to the (alleged) viewpoint of Madame de Volanges. In other words, Madame de Volanges’s viewpoint serves as a model (or filter), which Merteuil uses in order to create a fictive narrative “attack” episode, which is pervaded by the same kind of indignation that her friend would experience in such a situation. What does that mean in terms of coherence in progress? In order to understand Merteuil’s artful dissimulation and the manipulative dimension of her letter, readers need to activate and interconnect Merteuil’s and Volanges’s viewpoints and recognise both the adequacy of Merteuil’s representation of Volanges’ viewpoints and the intelligence with which she makes use of them. As Merteuil reveals in letter LXXXV, it was her declared goal to make the incident with Prévan as public as possible in order to destroy his reputation. The feint discomfort that she expresses in letter LXXXVII with regard to “the eyes of the public fixed on her” is thus entirely due to the perfect imitation of Volanges’s viewpoint, which indeed sharply contrasts with her own viewpoint. This contrast and the manipulative dimension of the letter can only be detected by readers that establish conceptual connections between the narrative space viewpoints of the two letters and the letters written by Volanges herself. These aspects of intersubjectivity and multiperspectivity are crucial for letter XLVIII as well since Valmont’s letter plays out the intersubjective potential of language. Valmont designs it such that it lends itself to three different readerly interpretations from three different viewpoints. Accordingly, the success of

130 “My dear and worthy friend, I write this in bed. The most disagreeable accident, and the most impossible to be foreseen, has, by the violent shock and chagrin it has occasioned, given me a fit of illness; not that I have any thing to reproach myself with: but it is always painful to a virtuous woman, who would preserve the modesty of her sex, to have the eyes of the public fixed on her, and I would give the world to have avoided this unhappy adventure” (DC, 243 [vol. II]).

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the letter – the fulfilment of its perlocutionary intentions – depends heavily on the adequacy of Valmont’s mental models of the Émilie, Merteuil and Tourvel’s perspectives. In the light of these insights, it is necessary to explore the explanatory potential of a last concept, namely multiperspectivity. Traditionally, the concept of multiperspectivity accounts mainly for the fact, already pointed out by Genette (1980, 190), that the text presents several viewpoints of the same event consecutively.131 Todorov (1967, 39, 81) calls this phenomenon “vision stéréoscopique” [stereoscopic vision] and Lindemann (1999, 48) speaks of “Polyperspektivität” [polyperspectivity]. Lindemann conceives of epistolary polyperspectivity as relying on an “iterative mode”, i.e. on the “repetition of one and the same event from different perspectives” (1999, 51, transl. mine). He emphasises that there is a clash of different, contrasting perspectives, which brings about an “effect of friction” (49). The reader plays a crucial role in his approach inasmuch as s/he experiences both proximity to the characters (due to the adoption of their viewpoints) and distance from them (due to his/her advance in knowledge). According to Lindemann (1999, 49), this oscillation between proximity and distance is a crucial element of the narrative “tension” of the epistolary novel, which cues readers to develop ideas about the future development of the plot (see 49). As the title of his article suggests, Lindemann conceives of epistolary polyperspectivity as “a simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous”; he argues that the simultaneous perception of one and the same event from different viewpoints is transformed into the nonsimultaneous form of successive letters (Lindemann 1999, 57). His approach takes account of the cognitive and emotive activities of readers and is well suited to describe the effects of “friction” (“Reibungseffekt”, 49, 51, 54) and of “dissonance” (“Dissonanzeffekt”, 69) between the viewpoints of Valmont, Merteuil, Tourvel and Émilie (something that Wolpe describes as “les brusques dérapages des points de vue”, 1960, 41). What Lindemann calls the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” has, however, to be understood the other way around: not as the nonsimultaneous (successive) representation of simultaneous perspectival perceptions, but as the simultaneous presence of several viewpoints (as an “effect of reception”) that are nonsimultaneous (since there is a temporal distance between Valmont’s writing of the letter and each women’s actual reading of it). Rousset describes this kind of simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous as follows: “Nous ne voyons pas seulement une main qui écrit, mais aussi les yeux qui liront; [. . .] Il y a

131 As Pomeau puts it: “D’un personnage à l’autre, nous faisons le tour de l’événement” (1993, 144).

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dialogue incessant et serré de présences simultanées”132 (1960, 95). Moravetz highlights this perspectival simultaneity as well; she explains that the addressed “YOU” is constantly present, even if it remains silent (1990, 28), and that the reader has (thus) to adopt simultaneously two viewpoints: those of the sender and of the addressee (38). Uspensky attempts to theorise the problem of simultaneous viewpoints on the “temporal plane” of perspectives: A more complicated form is one in which the same event is described simultaneously from several temporal positions. The narrative which results is not a juxtaposition of point of view, but a synthesis in which different temporal points of view are merged, so that the description appears, so to speak, as a kind of double exposure. Formally, this combination of temporal viewpoints may be manifested in the authorial commentary which accompanies or precedes the narration of a particular episode – and thus serves as a background against which the sequential account of the events is perceived. In these cases, the narrative can be cast in a double perspective: it can be conducted from the temporal perspective of one or more characters who participate in the action and, simultaneously, from the point of view of the author. [. . .] This double perspective derives from the double position of the narrator. (Uspensky 1973, 67, emphasis mine)

Uspensky’s position is telling in three regards. Firstly, his considerations comply very well with my approach in that he attempts to theorise perspectival ambiguity as well. He therefore describes forms of ambiguity – on the “temporal plane” of viewpoint, as in the quotation above (see the keywords in italics such as “simultaneously”, “synthesis”, “double perspective”), but also on the “plane of psychology”. In this connection, he compares the “synthesis” and “copresence of several internal views” to “the use of several light sources at once” (95–96), thus presenting the idea of blended perspectives (or, avant la lettre, of perspectival blending). Additionally, he describes perspectival ambiguity in his chapter on the “interrelations of points of view”, using key ideas of ambiguity theory as well (namely both the temporal metaphor of simultaneity and the spatial metaphor of superimposition): When the narration as a whole is conducted with a simultaneous use of several points of view, related to one another in different ways, the result is a complex (combined) compositional structure, which, if we were to represent it graphically, would be multidimensional. The points of view used during narration may enter into both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. [. . .] We are not talking about changes in the authorial position (that is, about the narrator’s shift from one point of view to another during the process of narration), but about the combination of points of view – that is, about the simultaneous

132 “We do not only see a hand that writes, but also the eyes that will read; [. . .] There is a steady and dense dialogue of simultaneous presences” (translation mine).

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use of several different positions. This instance occurs when there are several superimposed discrete compositional structures, articulated at the same level of analysis. (Uspensky 1973, 108–109, emphasis mine)

Secondly, however, Uspensky focuses primarily on the superimposition of narrator- and character-perspectives (and not on that of several characterperspectives, which thus remains a theoretical lacuna). In this regard, his position corresponds to a wide-spread conviction according to which “a narrative work can represent, in one and the same sections of text, [. . .] two centers for the generation of meaning: the narrator and the character. There is no third possibility” (Schmid 2010, 105). This assumption manifests itself – in Uspensky’s theory as well as in other approaches – in a sustained focus on either free indirect speech133 (see Uspensky 1973, 36, 42) or on first-person narration where “the dominant figural perspective [. . .] is superimposed with the accentuation of the narrating self” (Schmid 2010, 109). Thirdly, Uspensky’s account of perspectival simultaneity is too text-centred to account for the multiperspectivity of letter XLVIII where no “authorial commentary” (see above) nor any “description of the inner consciousness of several different people” (95, emphasis mine) by an “all-seeing and all-knowing observer” (96) can be found (but only by the outerdiegetic reader). While Uspensky’s considerations on perspectival ambiguity form a textcentred theory of perspectival simultaneity or superimposition, Hartner (2012) studies “the interplay of perspectives” (“Perspektivische Interaktion im Roman”) in terms of Fauconnier and Turner’s cognitive blending theory. Hartner’s (2012) model overlaps at many points with Dancygier’s (2012b). Both of them use Fauconnier and Turner’s idea of a blending network and conceptualise narratives as being constituted by a variety of mental spaces each of which has (or contributes to) a specific perspectival structure. Furthermore, both assume that these mental spaces form a network whose processes of conceptual integration allow the story as a whole to emerge, the latter being described as “multiperspectivity” or “perspectival interaction” (Hartner) or as the “story viewpoint space” (Dancygier). Hartner’s model, however, is more specifically centred on perspectival issues. “Since the majority of literary narratives present several characters, the cognitive necessity to establish correlations between models of characters and perspectives does not represent a marginal phenomenon of the reception of texts” (2012, 285, here and hereafter translation mine).

133 “If the narrator places his or her accentuation on the words that express the character’s evaluation, this statement becomes ‘doubled voiced’ (Bakhtin)” (Schmid 2010, 107).

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His approach is well suited to account for the multiperspectivity of letter XLVIII in that he understands perspective and multiperspectivity not as purely textual structures, but as an “emergent effect of reception” (Hartner 2012, 279). Furthermore, Hartner assumes that the perspectival structure of a text may be analysed via processes of conceptual integration, which create network connections (cross-space mappings, etc.) between mental constructions of different characters, of their singular perspectives and of situation models (172). This insight can be applied to letter XLVIII whose understanding presupposes that readers activate their mental models of Valmont, Merteuil, Tourvel (and, less significantly, of Émilie) and of the characters’ singular perspectives; moreover, readers have to establish connections between them within their situation model of the epistolary diegetic universe. Hartner’s approach thus emphasises aspects that are crucial for the narrative dynamic under consideration. If I prefer nonetheless to analyse letter XLVIII below in terms of narrative projection, it is mainly because of three divergences between Hartner’s and my approach. Since an understanding of these divergences presupposes an understanding of my model, I will elaborate on this subject directly after my analysis. 4.3.3.4 Letter XLVIII as narrative projection of viewpoints My understanding of letter XLVIII as an example of the narrative projection of viewpoints combines insights from different theories of perspective. My concept of viewpoint is primarily based both on Nünning’s constructivist approach to perspective and on Sweetser’s considerations on perspectival intersubjectivity. My conception of narrative projection, which draws on Jakobson’s projection principle, shares with Uspensky’s approach a concern for perspectival simultaneity, superimposition and compositionality, and with Nünning’s and Lindemann’s models a focus on perspectival frictions and contrasts. Above, I defined narrative projection as a textually as well as a cognitively determined process of negotiation by which texts cue readers to overfill one (or more) conceptual slots of their narrative schema. I claimed that the textual syntagm triggers the activation or creation of two (or more) frames that pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure and that the effect is, in Jakobson’s words, the superposition of paradigmatic similarity upon syntagmatic contiguity. I contend that the specificity of letter XLVIII can be analysed as a form of narrative projection. The viewpoints of Valmont, Tourvel, Merteuil (and Émilie) are narrative frames whose similarity consists of the fact that they all pertain to the same narrative paradigm of structure (viewpoint). Integrating insights from interpretative approaches to letter XLVIII, one can say that the letter cues readers to overfill the conceptual viewpoint slot of their generic schema (see Figure 16).

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Figure 16: Narrative projection of viewpoints in letter XLVIII (viewpoint of outerdiegetic readers).

The generic narrative schema represents an implicit norm from which the letter deviates, such deviation being at the core of ambiguity (see section 4.1.2). A single-focalised narrative segment corresponds to the norm according to which one narrative viewpoint frame is projected on one narrative syntagm. Consider, as an example, letter I, which Cécile sends to Sophie Carnay: “Je ne suis pas habillée, la main me tremble et le cœur bat” (LD, 12, lettre I).134 In letter XLVIII, by contrast, the narrative paradigm of structure “viewpoint” is potentially realised not once, but four times within one and the same textual syntagm. This is possible because the other female characters and their ways of seeing the world are cognitively available to readers, representing the “ground” of the letter.135 One could thus

134 “I am not dressed, and am in all agitation; my heart flutters” (DC, 4 [vol. I]). 135 On the relationship of figure and ground and the activity of foregrounding in the context of viewpoint, see Sweetser (2012).

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describe the simultaneity of viewpoints also as the sudden foregrounding (activation and elaboration) of a large amount of (perspectival) “ground”. The specific effect on readers, paraphrased as “density” (see Bourgeacq 1980, 188), is a perspectival co-presence and friction, which is typical for ambiguity. It should be noted, however, that the narrative projection that takes place here does not amount simply to a superposition of four unitary viewpoints. Each viewpoint is by itself a complex configuration, implying various conceptual (ideological, psychological), emotional and spatio-temporal components and dimensions. The co-presence of four compositional viewpoints creates a rich amount of diverse contrasts and correspondences between the various viewpoint dimensions of all four perspectives. Exploring the entirety of perspectival clashes would exceed the confines of this chapter, but I would like to show at least how patterns of opposition appear between Valmont’s and Tourvel’s viewpoints. I have decided to use Jakobson’s six factors of verbal communication as a means of analysing the contrasts between Tourvel’s and Valmont’s viewpoints. It seems to me that the use of Jakobson’s model is a legitimate methodical decision, since, if one agrees with Nünning’s concept of perspective as being “applicable [. . .] to the world-models of the fictional individuals that populate the represented universe” (2001, 207), and if the world-models of these fictional individuals also comprise the (communicative and/or epistolary) situation in which they are, then their viewpoints should also comprise their mental representations of the “constitutive factors of verbal communication” and of their corresponding “functions” (see Jakobson 1988).136 Correspondingly, I would like to focus on the differences that exist between the six Jakobsonian functions of letter XLVIII from Tourvel’s versus Valmont’s viewpoint (see Figure 17). My analysis of the narrative projection of viewpoints in letter XLVIII displays the perspective of outerdiegetic readers and is based on the assumption that readers activate several (and especially Valmont’s and Tourvel’s) perspectives while reading letter XLVIII. This assumption is consistent with Hartner’s claim that the processing of perspectives is closely intertwined with the mental models of characters that readers create and update during reading (see Hartner 2012, 100), but also with his hypothesis that readers imaginatively enrich mental models. The reader can therefore anticipate the thoughts and feelings that Tourvel will have (while reading this letter) as a possible future

136 Todorov (1967) uses Jakobson’s functions for the analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses as well. See also Moravetz (1990, 29, note 89).

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Figure 17: Zoom into the narrative projection of viewpoints of letter XLVIII: contrasts and correspondences between components of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s viewpoints.

element of the plot.137 Also Versini highlights the importance of the way the novel makes readers engage in anticipatory activities: [. . .] l’originalité des Liaisons n’est pas dans les lettres qui résument le passé, mais dans celles qui façonnent l’avenir. Chez Richardson, la lettre replaçait dans le passé, au point que trop souvent on oubliait le présent; chez Laclos, la lettre nous projette dans l’avenir, devient dynamique [. . .]. Le genre épistolaire est désormais chargé d’énergie.138 (Versini 1968, 298)

137 More precisely, the simultaneous presence of Tourvel’s and Valmont’s viewpoints results from a readerly anticipation of Tourvel’s reading of the letter. Lindemann characterises such anticipatory activities of reception as typical for epistolary “polyperspectivity” (1999, 49). 138 “[. . .] the originality of the Liaisons does not manifest itself in the letters that recount the past, but in those that carve the future. In Richardson’s novel, the letter transported readers into the past, such that one was close to forgetting the present; in Laclos’s novel, the letter

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Such an energy also inheres in letter XLVIII, which creates a sharp contrast between Tourvel’s future (addressee-)perspective on the letter and Valmont’s authorial viewpoint. Although my analysis focuses on functional contrasts, one should not forget that the viewpoints of the two characters can be analysed according to further dimensions (time, space, character), which create additional contrasts. Among the six functions identified by Jakobson, there is only one function of letter XLVIII that is not susceptible of being interpreted differently by Valmont and Tourvel, and this is the phatic function, that is, the “set for CONTACT”, which, according to Jakobson (1988, 37), serves to start and especially to sustain and to prolong communication. It has repeatedly been emphasised by the research literature that the very exchange of letters – as well as their length – is significant by itself. This is why Tourvel displays initially such a resistance against even the reception of Valmont’s letters; why she insists on removing all traces of their epistolary exchange139; and why she tries to convince herself (rather than her addressee, it seems) not to answer Valmont’s letters any more.140 Tourvel sees clearly the danger that the epistolary connection with Valmont represents for her. As she says in letter LVI: “Vous vous plaisez à m’embarrasser par des raisonnements captieux; vous échappez au miens.”141 This short sentence identifies correctly not only the pleasure that Valmont draws from the epistolary exchange (“Vous vous plaisez à [. . .]”), but also the effect of this communication on her: from an etymological point of view, his arguments “catch” her (“raisonnements captieux”); his fallacious arguments keep her in contact, prolong and deepen Valmont’s communication and relationship with her. The phatic function plays thus a crucial role for the development of the plot. Inasmuch as both Valmont and Tourvel are well aware of the significance of the very existence of their epistolary connection, Tourvel’s and Valmont’s viewpoints are similar regarding the phatic function (see Figure 17).

transports us into the future; it becomes dynamic [. . .]. The epistolary genre is from then on charged with energy” (transl. mine). 139 See the end of her first letter (XXVI) to Valmont: “je serais vraiment peinée qu’il restât aucune trace d’un événement qui n’eût jamais dû exister.” (LD, 59) (“I should be extremely mortified that any traces should remain of an event which ought never to have existed”, DC, 125 [vol. I]). 140 “Je ne veux plus vous répondre, je ne vous répondrai plus . . . ” (LD, 117, letter LVI). The English translation from 1784 is unfortunately quite inexact: “I will not reply to you any more” (DC, 27 [vol. II]). 141 “You take a pleasure in perplexing me, by captious reasons, and you evade mine” (DC, 27 [vol. II]).

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All the other five functions of the letter, however, are interpreted differently by the two characters. Consider, firstly, the function whose interpretative variation is best explored with regard to letter XLVIII: the referential function. This is the function to which Delon’s analysis of processes of (de-)metaphorisation applies. In sentences such as “[. . .] je viens chercher auprès de vous, Madame, un calme dont j’ai besoin, et dont pourtant je n’espère pas jouir encore” (LD, 102),142 key words such as calme [calm], besoin [need], jouir [enjoy] and encore [yet] create two different references. On the one hand, they point to the situation in which Valmont really is, alluding to the presence of the allegedly insatiable Émilie. This reference, which pertains to Valmont’s viewpoint, constructs the isotopy of sexuality, which runs through the whole letter (“le trouble que j’éprouve en ce moment”; “passions actives”; “[plus] heureux”; “délire”)143 and finds its highlight before the interruption of the letter: Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant; jamais je ne ressentis, dans cette occupation, une émotion si douce et cependant si vive. Tout semble augmenter mes transports: l’air que je respire est brûlant de volupté; la table même sur laquelle je vous écris [. . .] devient pour moi l’autel sacré de l’amour [. . .] Je devrais peut-être m’abandonner moins à des transports que vous ne partagez pas: il faut vous quitter un moment pour dissiper une ivresse qui s’augmente à chaque instant, et qui devient plus forte que moi. (LD, 103)144

According to Tourvel’s viewpoint, by contrast, the reference emerges from a metaphorical reading of these expressions and creates the isotopy of romantic love (instead of sexuality): the reference consists of feelings of passion, longing and desire, triggered by her imaginary presence in Valmont’s mind (and not by the actual presence of and interaction with naked Émilie). Consider also the motif of sleeplessness (“C’est après une nuit orageuse, et pendant laquelle je n’ai pas fermé l’œil [. . .]”).145 According to Valmont’s viewpoint, it alludes obviously to the long duration of his bodily pleasures and the metaphor of a storm to their intensity,

142 “I come to you, Madame, to seek the calm I so much stand in need of, and which I cannot yet hope to enjoy” (DC, 233 [vol. I]). 143 “[. . .] experience the emotions I do at this moment!”; “active passions”; “happier”; “delirium” (DC, 234 [vol. I]). 144 “Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you. Never did I feel in this pleasing employment so sweet, so lively an emotion! Everything conspires to raise my transports! The very air I breathe wafts me luxurious pleasure; even the table I write on, now, for the first time, consecrated by me to that use, becomes to me a sacred altar of love; [. . .] I ought, perhaps, to moderate transports you do not share in. I must leave you a moment to dissipate a phrenzy which I find growing upon me: I find it too strong for me” (DC, 235 [vol. I]). 145 “It is after a very stormy night, during which I have not closed my eyes [. . .]” (DC, 233 [vol. I]).

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while, according to Tourvel’s viewpoint, it is exactly the opposite that prevents him from sleeping: his craving for her, the unfulfilled desire for her. Secondly, there is also a sharp contrast between Valmont’s and Tourvel’s interpretation of the emotive function of the letter, which is “focused on the ADDRESSER, [and] aims a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about”, especially by the use of “expressive features” (such as interjections) and the “expressive tint” (ways of pronouncing and emphasising sentences) (see Jakobson 1988, 35). Considered from Valmont’s viewpoint, the emotive function of the letter expresses Valmont’s celebration of both libertine debauchery and rhetoric manipulation – a devilish joy associated with telling Tourvel quite openly about the sexual practices that accompany the redaction of the letter and with making her blind to this libertine tale. According to Tourvel’s viewpoint, on the contrary, the letter expresses both Valmont’s passionate love and the suffering and despair that accompany his unfulfilled desire. Consider, for example, the following sentence, highly emotive due to the initial interjection: “Quoi! ne puis-je donc espérer que vous partagerez quelque jour le trouble que j’éprouve en ce moment?”146 What, from Valmont’s viewpoint, expresses an optimistic enthusiasm about the libertine idea of using and disposing one day over Tourvel’s body, is, from Tourvel’s viewpoint, the expression of despair in view of the strong resistance that she opposes to his attempts of verbal seduction. What, in her eyes, is an expression of misery (“la peine que j’éprouve”147) and of lacking confidence and strength (“la confiance et la force m’abandonnent”148) is, from his viewpoint, nothing but dissimulation and a rhetorical mastery, designed to stimulate her imagination and compassion. This brings us, thirdly, to the conative function, that is, the orientation of the message toward the addressee. Valmont uses primarily four conative strategies in order to influence Tourvel: i. He attempts to arouse pity or compassion for him in her (“été sans cesse [. . .] dans l’agitation d’une ardeur dévorante”; “privations cruelles”, “en vain”, “le regret d’en être privé [des plaisirs de l’amour]” ; “la peine que j’éprouve” ; “douloureuse image”149) ;

146 “What! cannot I then hope that you will one day experience the emotions I do at this moment!” (DC, 234 [vol. I]). 147 “[. . .] the pains I experience” (DC, 236 [vol. I]). 148 “[. . .] my confidence and my strength both abandon me at once” (DC, 236 [vol. I]). 149 “[. . .] having been in incessant agitations [. . .] from uncommon ardour” (DC, 236 [vol. I]); “the most cruel state of privation” (235), “in vain”, “regret at being deprived of them [of the pleasures of love]”, “the pains I experience”, “this melancholy picture” (236).

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ii. He is enticing her into the joy of experiences she never had (“dans ce moment, je suis plus heureux que vous”; “jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant”; “l’air que je respire est brûlant de volupté”; “une émotion douce et cependant si vive”150); iii. He accuses her (“le désespoir auquel vous me livrez”; “m’accablez-vous de vous rigueurs”; “l’exil auquel vous me condamnez”; “privations cruelles”151); iv. He flatters her (“votre indulgence”; “ses bontés”152). These four conative strategies can be analysed further as two pairs of imperatives: Pair 1: i’. See how unhappy I am! (And thus console me!) ii’. See how happy I am! (And thus join me!) Pair 2: iii’. See how cruel you are! (And thus become sensitive!) iv’. See how good you are (in my eyes)! (And thus prove that you are as good as I see you to be!) Each pair of imperatives is based on two contrary illocutions: “I am unhappy” versus “I am happy” (pair 1) and “you are cruel (or bad)” versus “you are good” (pair 2). The intelligence of employing these imperatives resides firstly in the fact that Tourvel can hardly counter them; on the one hand, because imperatives do not lend themselves easily to verbal resistance, on the other hand, because each illocution implied by (or: hidden within) i’, ii’, iii’ and iv’ is already contradicted by its imperative counterpart. Secondly, Valmont’s ruse consists of the fact that the pairs of imperatives are a lesson given to Tourvel. Valmont implicitly teaches her how to evaluate herself and her worshipper morally: all that counts about Valmont is his happiness and all that Tourvel is judged by is her goodness.153 But since, according to Valmont’s rhetoric, it is Tourvel’s 150 “I am this moment happier than you” (DC, 234 [vol. I]); “Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you” (234); “The very air I breathe wafts my luxurious pleasure”; “so sweet, so lively an emotion” (235). 151 “[T]he despair to which you abandon me”; “you overwhelm me with your afflicting severities”; “the exile to which you have condemned me” (DC, 234 [vol. I]); “most cruel state of privation” (235). 152 “[Y]our indulgence” and “goodness” (DC, 236 [vol. I]). 153 That Tourvel either shares (or adopts?) this implicit message becomes obvious in letter CXXXII in which Tourvel considers it as a bonheur to be responsible for Valmont’s happiness: “si ce bonheur ne m’était pas réservé, d’être nécessaire au sien! [. . .] Quelle autre femme rendrait-il plus heureuse que moi? Et, je le sens par moi-même, ce bonheur qu’on fait naître, est le

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goodness that dictates Valmont’s happiness, their relationship is conceptualised as asymmetric. Moreover, since Valmont presents himself as unhappy, he also suggests that Tourvel has to do better. But how could she do better? Valmont’s letter proposes an answer to this question, which consists of the following, all-overarching, implicit imperative: Don’t resist any longer! The mastery of the letter thus resides, inter alia, in the creation of a number of uncomfortable semantic frictions and contradictions (see the imperatives above), which melt away in view of a single solution only: Tourvel’s consecration to love, which would make both of them both happy (“Si je me retrace encore les plaisirs de l’amour [. . .]”154) and good (“mon amour [. . .] est tel [. . .] que la vertu la plus sévère ne devrait pas le craindre”155). Altogether, the conative strategies thus serve the goal of influencing her way of thinking, her way of conceptualising the relationship. This brings us, fourthly, to the metalingual function, which, in letter XLVIII, serves a similar goal. “Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the CODE; it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e. glossing) function” (Jakobson 1988, 37). Although Valmont does not “check up” whether he and Tourvel use the same code, his message serves a metalingual function inasmuch as he attempts to blur conceptual boundaries and thus to modify Tourvel’s “code”. He does so by synthesising, in the concept of amour, several words and concepts that are strictly separated in Tourvel’s verbal and behavioral code: bonheur [felicity], vertu [virtue] and tranquillité [tranquillity] versus volupté [voluptuousness], désir [desire], passion [passion] and ivresse [frenzy]. Valmont negotiates between these word-concepts, as in the following sentence: “Croyez-moi, Madame la froide tranquillité, le sommeil de l’âme, image de la mort, ne mènent point au bonheur; les passions actives peuvent seules y conduire”.156 By associating tranquillité [tranquillity] with mort [death], Valmont valorises – in contrast to Tourvel’s way of thinking – les passions actives [the active passions] as representing the essence of life and as the true nature of bonheur [felicity]. Hence Valmont’s speech is “focused on” Tourvel’s (lexical-cognitive) code: he attempts to modify it by equating amour [love] and bonheur [felicity]. This provides letter XLVIII – as well as other

plus fort lien, le seul qui attache véritablement. Oui, c’est ce sentiment délicieux qui anoblit l’amour [. . .]” (LD, 318). 154 “If I recall to my mind the pleasures of love” (DC, 236 [vol. I]). 155 “[M]y passion [. . .] is such [. . .] as the strictest virtue would have no reason to dread” (DC, 236 [vol. I]). 156 “Believe me, Madam, settled tranquillity, the sleep of the soul, that image of death, does not lead to happiness; the active passions alone lead the way” (DC, 234 [vol. I]).

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letters157– with a metalingual function, which, however, is not intended to be understood by Tourvel. Although Tourvel feels that she is, in a way, under attack, she is not able to identify Valmont’s strategies of manipulation. The metalingual function is thus, strictly speaking, not part of her viewpoint, but only of Valmont’s. Turning to the poetic function, one has to make a clear distinction between two kinds (or levels) of poetic functions: a) the poetic function that the letter does (or can) fulfil for outerdiegetic readers. The determination of this poetic function presupposes a viewpoint which perceives the co-presence of several character-viewpoints; b) the poetic function that the letter fulfils from the viewpoint of each diegetic character. The former, which has a broader scope, gave birth to my analysis of the narrative projection of the viewpoints of Tourvel, Valmont, Merteuil and Émilie (from the viewpoint of the readers). The latter, by contrast, is what I intend to analyse now, on the lower structural level of Tourvel’s and Valmont’s singular viewpoints. My contention is that the letter does indeed fulfil, for Tourvel, a specific poetic function, which emerges directly from the rhetorical make-up of the letter. As I have explained above, the poetic function produces a “focus on the message for its own sake”, which is linked to ambiguity inasmuch as paradigmatically similar items, distributed on the syntagmatic axis, are “drawn together in meaning”. As a result, syntagmatic multiplicity is perceived as a unity (“any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation”, Jakobson 1988, 49). Letter XLVIII is designed to produce in Tourvel such an ambiguous unity. The paradigm that is projected onto the syntagmatic axis is a semantic one, constituted by bonheur [felicity]. Within the paradigm of bonheur, two concepts compete with each other. On the one hand, there is Tourvel’s idea of bonheur, with which Valmont is familiar through her three preceding letters. This concept is equivalent to tranquillité, vertu, honnêteté and sécurité [tranquility, virtue, 157 In letter XXXVI, for instance, Valmont negotiates explicitly the words with which he should be described. This amounts to negotiating with Tourvel about her idea of Valmont: “Voilà pourtant, Madame, voilà le récit fidèle de ce que vous nommez mes torts, et que peut-être il serait plus juste d’appeler mes malheurs” (LD, 78) (“This is, notwithstanding, a true recital of what you call injuries, which rather deserve to be called misfortunes”; DC, 174 [vol. I]). The English translation of malheurs as “misfortunes” hides the fact that, by proposing the concept of malheur, Valmont picks up a word that Tourvel has used earlier to describe herself as malheureuse (see letter XXVI; translated as “miserable” in the translation of 1784). By doing so, Valmont attempts to trigger compassion in her ― and thereby establishing the idea that they are soulmates who share the same feelings.

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honesty and security]. On the other hand, there is the concept defended by Valmont, which identifies bonheur with a passionate amour characterised by agitations, transports, volupté and ivresse [agitations, transports, voluptuousness and frenzy]. If Valmont did nothing but contrast her and his own concept of love, there would be no ambiguity and no unity-in-multiplicity; indeed, he would even widen the gulf that separates him from her. What Valmont does instead in order to bridge this gulf – and here I go one step further than Delon158 – is to make Tourvel’s idea of (virtuous) bonheur his own, notably without erasing the opposite standpoint. This is an ingenious move by which Valmont internalises the dichotomy between the two concepts of bonheur (rhetorically, not psychologically); he thereby dispossesses Tourvel rhetorically of her antagonist moral standpoint. By assimilating Tourvel’s position and by adding it to his own rhetoric-conceptual repertoire, Valmont wins control over it: he can now handle and operate with the conceptual copy of Tourvel’s standpoint relatively freely, i.e. without being constrained by Tourvel’s actual moral-ideological response. How exactly does Valmont manage to do that? It seems to me that, instead of maintaining the original antagonism between his own and Tourvel’s concepts of bonheur, Valmont merges (synthesises, unites) them rhetorically159: Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant; jamais je ne ressentis, dans cette occupation, une émotion si douce, et cependant si vive. Tout semble augmenter mes transports; l’air que je respire est brûlant de volupté; la table même sur laquelle je vous écris, consacrée pour la première fois à cet usage, devient pour moi l’autel sacré de l’amour, combien elle va s’embellir à mes yeux! j’aurai tracé sur elle le serment de vous aimer toujours! Pardonnez, je vous en supplie, au désordre de mes sens. Je devrais peut-être m’abandonner moins à des transports que vous ne partagez pas: il faut vous quitter un moment pour dissiper une ivresse qui s’augment à chaque instant, et qui devient plus forte que moi.160

He describes his love both in erotic (“brûlant de volupté”; “désordre de mes sens”; “transports”; “ivresse”)161 and in quasi-religious (and thus virtuous)

158 See section 4.3.3.2. 159 See my analysis of the third part of the letter in section 4.3.3.1. 160 “Never did I before experience so much pleasure in writing to you. Never did I feel in this pleasing employment so sweet, so lively an emotion! Everything conspires to raise my transports! The very air I breathe wafts me luxurious pleasure; even the table I write on, now, for the first time, consecrated by me to that use, becomes to me a sacred altar of love; how much more lustre will it not hence derive in my eyes! I will have engraven on it my oath ever to love you! Forgive, I beseech you, my disordered sense. I ought, perhaps, to moderate transports you do not share in. I must leave you a moment to dissipate a phrenzy which I find growing upon me: I find it too strong for me” (DC, 234–235 [vol. I]). 161 “[L]uxurious pleasure”, “my disordered senses, “transports”, ”frenzy”.

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terms that connote sacrality (“l’autel sacré de l’amour”),162 eternity (“serment de vous aimer toujours”)163 and prayer (“Pardonnez, je vous en supplie”).164 He both gives himself entirely up to his feelings (“tant de plaisir” [“so much pleasure”]; “tout semble augmenter mes transports” [“Everything conspires to raise my transports”]) – thus performing passionate love – and criticises himself for this behaviour (“Je devrais peut-être m’abandonner moins à des transports [. . .]”),165 thus adopting a moral viewpoint that imitates and hence replaces the original one of Tourvel, oriented towards tranquillité. This synthetic work is encapsulated, in nuce, in the expression “une émotion si douce, et cependant si vive” [“so sweet, so lively an emotion”]: the idea of tenderness correlates with Tourvel’s idea of tranquility; the idea of liveliness, by contrast, pertains to Valmont’s idea of love and the word-concept of “émotion” [emotion] is susceptible of covering both the idea of bonheur and of amour. Indeed, the whole letter oscillates between tender166 and tempestuous167 emotions and thus performs what is condensed in the expression “une émotion si douce, et cependant si vive”. It should also be noted that, at least on the surface, the quasi-totality of the letter is a self-portrait in which Valmont renders his feelings transparent. Inasmuch as transparency (i.e. sincerity) and authenticity are key elements of Tourvel’s moral compass,168 his feigned honesty, highlighted explicitly at the end of the letter, is an additional rhetorical device, which serves to synthesise Tourvel’s concept of bonheur and Valmont’s concept of amour. Indeed, Valmont accomplishes even more by playing the transparency card, since he has apparently well understood that Tourvel is herself torn between two moral priorities: Do not dissimulate! and Conduct yourself decently! If she does not dissimulate her feelings for Valmont, she keeps the first and breaks the second rule; but if she denies her feelings, she breaks the first and keeps the second. By combining love and passion with ideas of respect and quasi-religious virtue, Valmont lays out

162 “[T]he sacred altar of love” (DC, 235). 163 “[O]ath ever to love you” (DC, 235). 164 “Forgive, I beseech you” (DC, 235). By these quasi-religious utterances, Valmont puts Tourvel implicitly into the role of a goddess to whom he prays at an altar. By using this rhetorical strategy, he not only flatters her vanity, but also creates deceitful pictures: one of her as being powerful, and one of him as being dependent on her grace. 165 “I ought, perhaps, to moderate transports you do not share in” (DC, 235). 166 See especially the fifth (last) part of the letter. 167 See especially the first and third part of the letter. 168 As she puts it in her first letter to Valmont: “je ne sais ni dissimuler ni combattre les impressions que j’éprouve” (LD, 58, letter XXVI). Valmont imitates both of these incapacities in letter XLVIII.

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bait, namely the idea of a love that would allow Tourvel to act without breaking either of these two rules. The result of Valmont’s rhetorical synthesis is a multifaceted concept of love, which integrates (or superimposes) the various opposite terms of the moral dimension of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s original viewpoints: erotic abandon and religious devotion, tempestuousness and tenderness, vice and virtue (see Figure 18). It should be emphasised that Valmont, insofar as he constructs this conceptual synthesis, not only rhetorically conciliates his own and Tourvel’s ways of thinking; Valmont performs, on a cognito-verbal level, a unification with Tourvel, which will be realised later on a bodily level. By uniting himself, on his own authority, with Tourvel on a rhetorical level, Valmont substitutes, anticipates and fosters their sexual union rhetorically. Tourvel ends up uniting herself with Valmont by the very reading of the letter, only by following its rhetorical parcours.169 This is indeed why Tourvel writes, in her next letter (L) to Valmont: “Il me semble que d’en parler seulement, altère la tranquillité; et c’est autant par goût que par devoir, que je vous prie de vouloir bien garder le silence sur ce point” (LD, 106).170 She intuitively recognises the performative power of Valmont’s strategies. Briefly, letter XLVIII can be said to perform a poetic function for Tourvel inasmuch as two contrasting concepts of bonheur – and all of the contrasts that are implied by this paradigmatic opposition – are projected onto the syntagmatic axis, where they are “drawn together in meaning”. As a result, the epistolary sequence of semantic units builds an “equation”. This equation consists of an idea of love that is ambiguous to the extent to which it combines (i.e., superimposes and co-presents) the sharpest contrasts. It is this multifaceted, incongruent, ambiguous concept of love that is susceptible of producing, in Tourvel, a focus on the letter “for its own sake”. The assumption according to which such a focus on the letter for its own sake is part of Tourvel’s viewpoint is sustained by the great value that Tourvel assigns even to Valmont’s earlier letters, which she copies (before sending the original back to Valmont), pieces together (after having them torn to shreds) and wets with her tears (see letter XLIV). It is the letters themselves, their concrete rhetorical make-up, which seduce and

169 This assumption is sustained by the next letter Tourvel addresses to Valmont. In this letter, Tourvel expresses less resistance against talking about love, or moral scruples, but rather fear of the unknown, wild, Valmontesque side of love: “Quel ravage effrayant ne ferait-il [ce délire dangereux, ESW] donc pas sur un cœur neuf et sensible [. . .]?” (LD, 105, letter L). 170 “I think that even speaking of it hurts tranquillity; and it is as much from inclination as duty, that I beseech you to be hereafter silent on that subject” (DC, 341–342 [vol. I]).

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Narrative (expected narrative information)

generic schema

viewpoint slot

conceptual slot of the narrative schema

paradigmatic "slot" axis VP Tourvel

VP Valmont

Time Space ideology: Character bonheursensibility Phatic Function Referential Function Emotive Function Conative Function Metalingual Function

ideology: amourlibertinism

Time Space Character Phatic Function Referential Function Emotive Function Conative Function [Metalingual Function]

patterns of contrast and correspondence between and within

Poetic function: superposition of messages

Poetic function: loveambivalent

the viewpoints of Tourvel and Valmont:

bonheurTourvel

- virtue / religion - tranquility - honnesty vs. decency

amourValmont - eroticism - passion

MessageTourvel

zoom into the

MessageÉmilie

poetic function

MessageMerteuil

of letter XLVIII

VP Merteuil

VP Émilie

Letter XLVIII Narrative syntagm (provided narrative information)

Les Liaisons dangereuses

Figure 18: Zoom into the narrative projection of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s viewpoints: contrasts between the poetic functions of the letter.

fascinate Tourvel and catch all her attention. In a nutshell, from Tourvel’s point of view, letter XLVIII represents probably a very “poetic” declaration of love, and that especially because of its ambiguity. Although Valmont has designed the letter so as to fulfil this poetic function for Tourvel, the letter fulfils another poetic function for him. It is a widely acknowledged fact that the competition between Valmont and Merteuil not only concerns libertine practice, in the narrow sense, but also epistolary practices.

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Merteuil criticises, for example, the lack of disorder in Valmont’s letters to Tourvel (see letter XXXIII) and thereby attempts to impose herself as the mistress of epistolary poetics. Valmont, for his part, makes an attempt to prove to Merteuil that she is wrong ―that he is the master of epistolary poetics― by writing a letter (XLVIII) that carries three different messages, with six different functions, for three different readers, messages that are perfectly adapted to each of the reader’s viewpoints. For Valmont, the poetic function of the letter thus consists most probably of the superposition of messages in letter XLVIII. From his viewpoint, the poetic function of the letter thus amounts to a readeroriented ambiguity, which, in his eyes, can and will be appreciated the most adequately by Merteuil. The poetic function that the letter fulfils for us and for Valmont is thus nearly identical, with two differences. On the one hand, we are of course not the readers that he aims to impress with this letter; on the other hand we ascribe the rhetoric genius and the poetic superposition of messages not to Valmont (alone), but rather to his creator, Choderlos de Laclos. To conclude my analysis, I would like to make three final comments, the first concerning the complexity of Figure 18, the second regarding the distinction between the viewpoints of the reader and of Valmont and the third drawing on the link between ambiguity, literariness and narrative projection. Firstly, the arrows whose lines are interrupted in Figure 18 contribute significantly to the complexity of the model. Consider the ideologies of Valmont and Tourvel. On the one hand, they constitute important dimensions of their (compositional) viewpoints and contrast sharply with each other. On the other hand, the two partial viewpoints (i.e. Tourvel’s and Valmont’s ideologies) participate in a specific dimension of Tourvel’s viewpoint, namely in her perception of the poetic function of letter XLVIII. Valmont “transplants” – if I may use this metaphor – his ideology into Tourvel’s viewpoint. Inasmuch as this is Valmont’s intention, or, more precisely, an effect of his manipulation, this process of “transplantation”, which is part of Tourvel’s internal viewpoint dynamics, is also part of Valmont’s viewpoint. In a way, Valmont thus controls her viewpoint. This is why an arrow links Tourvel’s entire viewpoint (at the top of the figure) to the message that is addressed to Tourvel according to the poetic function of Valmont’s viewpoint. The complexity of these viewpoint dynamics is thus considerable; it increases even more if one imagines, hypothetically, Tourvel as being able to recognise Valmont’s communicative intentions. In this case, all the interperspectival dynamics, represented in the figure above, would have to be represented as being embedded within her viewpoint. It is exactly the excessive complexity of such interperspectival projections and embeddings that is capable of explaining . . .

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1. 2.

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. . . Tourvel’s defeat: she is indeed not able to free herself of this confusing web of perspectival links, which Valmont spins around her; . . . Valmont’s mastery, as it can in fact be acknowledged by Merteuil. While Tourvel is too deeply embedded in the perspectival web to overview it, Merteuil is able to understand and valorise, from her meta-perspective, Valmont’s way of cocooning Tourvel in perspectival contradictions.

Secondly, an important distinction has to be made between Valmont’s mental models (of himself, of Tourvel and of the other women implicitly addressed by letter XLVIII, as they can be reconstructed from his language use, see Bourgeacq 1980) and the reader’s mental models of these four characters. Delon (1986, 120) notes that the reader has to be successively Tourvel, Émilie and Merteuil. But the reader begins probably by being (i.e. by assuming the authorial viewpoint of) Valmont – and being Valmont implies being successively Tourvel, Émilie and Merteuil, since, as intended readers, their perspectives are part of his viewpoint. Nonetheless, the reader has the option of taking his/her distances towards Valmont’s perspective and of imagining, on the basis of his/her own mental models of the women, their readings of Valmont’s letter. But readers do not have an epistemic lead on Valmont. Consequently, the viewpoints of the reader and of Valmont tend to merge. It is this tendency to perspectival fusion that incites the research literature to speak of a “complicity” or “involuntary conspiracy” (May 1963, 184–185) between Valmont and the reader.171 Thirdly, the research literature draws extensively on letter XLVIII, but does not reflect on its reasons for focussing on it. Obviously, it is the ambiguousness of letter XLVIII that provokes fascination, but it is not made clear why ambiguousness is particularly worthy of attention. An answer may be found, however, in George May’s comment according to which “words with double meaning probably are the most literary” (1963, 183). It thus seems as if there is an implicit approval for Empson’s statement according to which “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (1973, 21) (insofar as one understands poetry in a large sense, which is not restricted to poems). Provided that the object of literary studies are literary structures, features or processes, the research interest seems to grow with the degree of literariness of the text

171 May, however, illuminates another facet of this complicity. If Valmont writes letters in which “the play on words cannot be appreciated by any of the fictional characters, save Valmont himself”, precisely because the letter is not forwarded to Merteuil or someone else, then it seems indeed as if Valmont addresses these ambivalences to the reader, “like an actor who winks on stage at his audience” (1963, 184).

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(segment) under consideration,172 and ambiguity seems to be an important factor of the degree of literariness. Thus, if the narrativity of letter XLVIII is considered to hinge on its ambiguity, any narratological model that claims to be adequate to the object under consideration should be able to explain how multiperspectivity, ambiguity and literariness are (apparently) interwoven. My model attempts to satisfy this requirement by describing the letter’s multiperspectivity as a narrative projection of viewpoints, which creates an ambiguous co-presence or superposition. The latter, in turn, creates perspectival contrasts between viewpoints and viewpoints dimensions, thus replacing perspectival unity by a perspectival (rhizomatic) multiplicity. Superimposed narrative viewpoints represent thus a form of coherence in progress (i.e. a rhizomatic dynamics), which is in turn connected with subjective impressions of literariness. 4.3.3.5 Cognitive network or superimposition of viewpoints? Why should one analyse letter XLVIII as a form of narrative projection, as a superimposition of viewpoints, rather than as a form of “multiperspectivity” according to Hartner’s (2012) model? There are three differences between Hartner’s and my approach, which are due, I think, to differences between the metaphors that underlie our approaches. Hartner’s blending theoretical approach is based on the spatial metaphor of a network, whilst I am using the spatial metaphor of superimposition (i.e., a “layered” model). As I pointed out above (see section 4.1.5), there is an irreducible perspectivity in talking about ambiguity inasmuch as researchers emphasise different aspects of ambiguity. One can focus on (i) its incongruent (competitive) versus holistic (blended, co-present) dimension; (ii) its processual versus resultative dimension and (iii) on its textual versus cognitive dimension. I claimed that what metaphor one chooses in order to describe forms of ambiguity depends on the dimension one decides to focus on. It is my contention that the differences between Hartner’s model and my approach arise precisely from such differences in the research focus. The first important difference, which is linked to perspectivity (i), resides in Hartner’s rejection of the conceptual pair of the syntagmatic versus paradigmatic and, respectively, of similarity and difference (see Hartner 2012,

172 One could also put it the other way around, saying that the researchers focus their analyses on textual objects that manifest best those qualities that they conceive of as “literary”. Todorov makes a similar point: “Si une étude de poétique traite d’une œuvre littéraire, cette œuvre n’est, à son tour, rien d’autre qu’un langage dont la poétique se sert pour parler d’ellemême” (1967, 8).

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169–175).173 These oppositions are highlighted by other theories of multiperspectivity as well as by my approach. Hartner’s position shifts between a complete rejection of the conceptual pair as “outmoded” (“veraltet”, 173) and a more moderate criticism of its explanatory power according to which an analysis based on the structuralist opposition of similarity and difference, although it can lead to the “right” results (172), proves to be “incomplete, since important effects of reception cannot be theorised in terms of difference and congruence” (172, transl. and emphasis mine). What is lacking, in Hartner’s eyes, is a tool with which to describe the dynamic interplay of character, perspective and the narrative situation model. By arguing this way, Hartner redefines the explanandum, shifting from the microstructural scope of specific viewpoints to a macro-structural analysis. He focuses on the holistic dimension of narrative viewpoint rather than on partial viewpoint phenomena and their incongruences.174 This becomes obvious as he points to the restricted applicability of the opposition of congruence and difference instead of devaluating the opposition as such: the opposition lends itself better to an analysis of microstructural phenomena (low-level viewpoint clashes) than to the conceptualisation of a macrostructural network, which constitutes the overall narrative gestalt. His model thus does not present an alternative to the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic as analytical tools, but offers an additional tool, suited to link viewpoints to the overall narrative gestalt. This shift of analytical focus explains the paradox according to which Hartner both rejects and works with the dichotomy of congruence and difference. Consider his analysis of the contrary ways in which the characters Matthew Bramble and Lydia – in Tobias Smolletts’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker – perceive and conceptualise the spa town of Bath (see 171–172). He emphasises that the clash of their perspectives serves the characterisation of Matthew and Lydia, of their relationship and of Bath as their shared object of contemplation. According to his main argument, binary oppositions cannot account for the emergent, complex web of interconnections between their different perspectives, the mental models of their characters and the overall narrative situation model. A blending-theoretical account, by contrast, would allow for the exploration of these connections (see 173). But instead of showing, in his literary

173 He criticises them for “the fact that the inflexible relational matrix of congruence and difference, used to specify the relations between contents, is not susceptible of describing particular effects of the alignment of perspectives theoretically” (2012, 170, translation mine). 174 Since, if Hartner searches for the conceptual connections between mental models of characters, character-viewpoints and the overall story told by the narrative, he clearly focuses on the emergence of the holistic gestalt of the narrative, i.e. its macro-structure (resultative coherence).

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analysis, that the sharp contrast between Lydia’s and Bramble’s perspectives is non-essential, he demonstrates the contrary, working out especially the opposition between the two perspectives. What is more, Hartner describes the picture of Bath, which emerges from this clash of contrary character-perspectives, as “ambivalent” (173), but he does not seem to see that ambivalence or ambiguity is based on an incongruence, that is, on an interplay of syntagmatic-paradigmatic similarities and contrasts. If Bath is represented ambiguously, it is because of the dissonance between the two character-perspectives of Bath. Hartner thus proves to focus on the holistic dimension of viewpoint ambiguity by simultaneously highlighting the fact that there is ambiguity and by downplaying the perspectival clashs, contrasts, or differences from which this ambiguity arises. His perspective of research is oriented towards the co-presence of blended elements on a global, macro-structural level (network metaphor), while my approach aims at analysing the interplay of syntagmatic-paradigmatic equivalences, contrasts and competitions on a lower, micro-structural level of narrativity (metaphor of superimposition). Hartner’s focus on the holistic dimension of narratives and narrative ambiguity goes, secondly, hand in hand with an orientation towards the resultative (instead of processual) dimension of narrativity (perspectivity 2). This becomes especially obvious as he criticises “the inflexible relational matrix of congruence and difference” for the fact that it is “not susceptible of describing particular effects of the alignment of perspectives theoretically” (2012, 170, translation and emphasis mine). His aim is to analyse not the alignment or clash of perspectives themselves, but the holistic perspectival network, which results from the interlinkage of various perspectives, character models and further mental spaces. It seems to me that Hartner’s focus on resultative coherence is due to his use of blending theory (on which he bases his approach to narrative perspective). Fauconnier and Turner’s model is designed to explain thinking in terms of successful (i.e. completed processes of) blending and comprehension. Correspondingly, they explain aha-effects as resulting from an “equilibrium” in the network, which is established only “if structure comes up in the blend that projects back automatically to the inputs” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 44). I do not want to impugn that letter XLVIII may be analysed in terms of blending. It can be considered as a complex network of mental spaces, which integrates various mental spaces; each involved character is, for its part, constituted by a network of character and perspective models; altogether, all of the involved characters and character perspectives can be considered to form a broad integrated web of perspectives. But can blending theory account for the specific “effect of reception”, i.e. for the readerly impression according to which several perspectives are “compressed” and “superimposed” within letter XLVIII such that they create an effect of “density”?

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The only way blending theory could possibly account for this specificity is by analysing letter XLVIII as presenting, by itself, a “blended space” that triggers complex “backward projections” to the viewpoints of Valmont, Tourvel, Merteuil and Émilie. But this solution has three inconveniences. Firstly, it does not put special emphasis on the contrasts (for instance between the sexual versus romantic isotopies) that provide the letter with its impertinence and ambiguousness. Secondly, the network metaphor conveys an idea of extension rather than of density: it allows letter XLVIII to be analysed as an extended web of meanings, by “decompressing” its contents, but it does not illustrate the impression of density and compression itself, which is indeed at the core of ambiguity. Thirdly, analysing letter XLVIII as a “blended space” would be literally incorrect, since a blended space is an emergent cognitive structure, not a piece of text. This leads us to the third difference between Hartner’s and my approach, linked with perspectivity (iii). Blending theory is a theory of cognition, not of text; therefore, it cannot sufficiently account for the textual side of narrative dynamics. Correspondingly, Hartner’s use of blending theory makes him focus by tendency more on the cognitive side of perspective than on the textual side: “(Multi)perspecivity is [. . .] not a textual structure, but a product of textual strategies, which direct the reader’s attention. Principally, they can be found on different levels of text processing and resort to a broad range of means” (2012, 279, transl. and emphasis mine). His theory thus covers potentially all textual strategies suited to provoke any kind of interplay of perspectives, but it does not account for any specific interplay of text and cognition. My approach, by contrast, allows the specificity of the interplay of text and cognition in letter XLVIII to be analysed as a remarkable co-presence and competition between several perspectives, which are superimposed in one and the same textual syntagm. My model also answers another question: that of knowing why the textual-cognitive superimposition of viewpoints is perceived as remarkable, namely because of a breaking of generic norms through a process of projection. This process of projection can be analysed as an interplay of syntagmatic similarity (the four viewpoints originate in the same syntagm), paradigmatic similarity (the four viewpoints originate in the same paradigm of structure) and paradigmatic difference (the viewpoints contrast with each other in various regards). To conclude, I would like to add a last difference between Hartner’s and my approach. The opposition between paradigmatic similarity and difference, which in my eyes is crucial to an understanding of the perspectival structure of letter XLVIII (as well as to other phenomena of narrative projection), parallels the difference between perspective and multiperspectivity. A textual syntagm that actualises only one viewpoint (e.g. letter I) lacks paradigmatic difference since there is no second viewpoint, which would complete for filling the conceptual

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viewpoint slot of that textual segment. Hartner, however, objects to drawing a line between perspectivity and multiperspectivity, considering them as resulting from the same universal processes of conceptual integration (see 279). Hartner’s downplaying of the difference between perspectivity and multiperspectivity stands in sharp contrast to the interpretative approaches to letter XLVIII, summarised above, which rely precisely on that difference. These approaches emphasise how perspectival ambiguity deviates from the default case of a single perspective and contributes to the novel’s literariness.

4.4 Advantages and other forms of narrative projection To conclude, analysing letter XLVIII in terms of narrative projection has four advantages. First of all, it can bridge the gap between (non-narratological) concepts of ambiguity and the (narratological) concept of multiperspectivity, both crucial for an understanding of the letter in question. Secondly, it can account for “patterns of contrast” between character-perspectives (see Nünning 2001, 215–216), i.e. for perspectival “frictions” and “dissonances” whose importance is highlighted by some approaches (see, for example, Lindemann 1999, 51, 54) and downplayed by others (see Hartner 2012, 169–175). Thirdly, it may serve as a correction to a wide-spread conviction according to which the only form of “superimposed” narration consists of a combination of narrator and character speech. But perhaps the most important advantage consists, fourthly, in the fact that narrative projection is a general narrative dynamic that not only helps analyse the superimposition of viewpoints, but also other narrative phenomena, linked to other narrative paradigms of structure. Unfortunately, it goes beyond the confines of this chapter to work out further forms of narrative projection in full depth, but I will nonetheless give some examples, which will hopefully illustrate the usefulness of narrative projection as an instrument of analysis. Concerning the level of narrative discourse, Laclos’s novel gives us some examples of the narrative projection of “voices” (i.e. of narrative “voice” frames). Not only free indirect discourse can be understood as a superposition of projected voice frames, but also inter- and intratextual references.175 Concerning the latter, the research literature has repeatedly emphasised the role that italicised

175 This assumption is consistent with Genette’s description of the hypertextual palimpsest as an ambiguous phenomenon.

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words occupy in Merteuil’s epistolary discourse,176 especially in her letters to Valmont. In letter CXXVII, for instance, Merteuil caricatures Valmont’s discourse: “Qui, moi! je sacrifierais un gout [. . .] pour m’occuper de vous? en attendant à mon tour, et en esclave soumise, les sublimes faveurs de votre Hautesse. Quand, par exemple, vous voudrez vous distraire un moment de ce charme inconnu que l’adorable, la céleste Madame de Tourvel, vous a fait seul éprouver” (LD, 307).177 By italicising “ce charme inconnu” and “l’adorable, la celeste Madame de Tourvel”, Merteuil quotes Valmont. Interestingly, Merteuil quotes not only from Valmont’s last letter (CXXV), where his sexual union with Tourvel makes him experience an “unkown charm” (apparently, the charm of falling in love), but also from one of the first letters (VI) in which Valmont already characterises Tourvel as “adorable” and “celestial”. Throughout the whole epistolary exchange, Merteuil thus spends considerable attention to the way Valmont characterises his feelings for Tourvel; she apparently remembers each word with which Valmont compliments Tourvel. These words and these feelings arouse her jealousy and her destructive urge for vengeance. In the italicised expressions, Merteuil’s and Valmont’s voices are thus superimposed on each other and it is precisely through this superimposition that Merteuil succeeds in creating a sharp, satirical contrast between Valmont’s and her own use of these words, and, consequently, between her and his way of thinking. On the level of story, Letter CXX of Les Liaisons dangereuses provides an example of how two narrative “event” frames are projected onto a single event slot. In this letter, Valmont asks Père Anselme to arrange a meeting with Tourvel in order to give her back the letters and to offer her his apologies for his former behaviour. Since readers have at that point no insight into Valmont’s actual state of mind (since the war between Merteuil and him has begun), they are subject to the same interpretative difficulties as the addressee, and these difficulties are considerable. Would Valmont really dare to write “Je crois donc pouvoir sans indiscretion m’adresser à vous, pour en obtenir un service bien essentiel, vraiment digne de votre saint ministère” (LD, 285, lettre

176 Delon, for instance, oberserves that “l’italique n’est pas systématique dans LLD. Il est assez présent pour faire douter de chaque affirmation en romain. Il sert d’indice, de repère ou d’avertissement qui engage le lecteur à suspecter tout discours, à chercher derrière chaque affirmation les motivations ou les modèles. L’italique transforme toute écriture en palimpseste et toute lecture en suspicion“ (Delon 1986, 86). See also Delon (1983). 177 “Why, waiting for my turn, like a submissive slave, the sublime favours of your highness. When, for example, you was inclined to relax for a moment from that unknown charm that the adorable, the celestial M[me] de Tourvel only had made you feel” (DC, 28 [vol. IV, letter CXXVIII]).

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CXX, emphasis mine),178 if he only wished to use Father Anselmus in order to break through Tourvel’s defences? Would he really “implore” the Father’s “mediation, for a still more important, and, unhappily, a much more difficult reconciliation” (DC, 203 [vol. III]; “implorer votre médiation pour une réconciliation bien plus importante encore, et malheureusement plus difficile, LD, 285), which should take place after his planned reconciliation with Tourvel, if he were not repenting his malicious conduct? More importantly, would he be able to penetrate and simulate so perfectly a mental condition of repentance without being affected at all by the thoughts and feelings associated with this mental condition? As these interpretative questions show, the letter itself can be read as representing two entirely different events, which become superimposed and compete with each other as conceptual frames. Either the letter represents Valmont’s repentance and return to God (and thus a peripety) or it represents a new peak of impertinence, rhetorical mastery and moral defection and the decisive step towards the accomplishment of his original goal of seduction. Besides the narrative paradigm of structure of “event”, narrative projection can concern the “character” slot of the generic narrative schema. As I pointed out above, Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis provides a good example for a novel that is substantially based on the narrative projection of character frames. It is, in a way, misleading as the narrator explains that Gregor Samsa “found himself transformed [. . .] into a gigantic insect” (Kafka 1986, 9, emphasis mine), for this insinuates a (temporally and ontologically successive) transition from a human state to an animal state. Gregor, however, is simultaneously both a man and vermin, i.e. a blend of a human being and a repulsive insect. The story can be analysed as relying heavily on a process of narrative projection whereby two beings (a man and an insect) are projected onto the same character slot (that of the protagonist) as the narrative unfolds syntagmatically. Also Valmont can serve as an example of this type of narrative projection, inasmuch as his ofteninvoked ambiguity results from the competition between two narrative character frames. One frame represents an essentially manipulative libertine, incapable of authentic love; the other frame depicts a person who is in love with Tourvel, but suppresses his feelings for her due to a secondary, non-essential libertine ambition. I would like to add two further examples, which show how the concept of narrative projection of character frames and a heightened awareness of the spatial and temporal metaphors that are used to describe it may be useful in

178 “I think I may address myself to you without being guilty of indiscretion, to obtain an essential piece of service, truly worthy your whole ministry” (DC, 201 [vol. III], emphasis mine).

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narrative theory and interpretative praxis. My first example draws on what I consider to be a misunderstanding. In his work on the logic of narrativity, Sturgess (1992) criticises Joseph Frank’s ideas of the “spatial form” of modern literature. He presents two quotations in which Frank explains, with regard to Proust, i. “that the reader must perceive the identity of past and present images of the same characters ‘in a moment of time, that is to say, space’” (quoted in Sturgess 1992, 133); ii. and that “‘by the discontinuous presentation of character Proust forces the reader to juxtapose disparate images [of his characters] spatially, in a moment of time, so that the experience of time’s passage is communicated directly to his [the reader’s] sensibility’” (quoted in Sturgess 1992, 133–134; orig. italics and square brackets). Sturgess maintains that “virtually no spatial dimension is involved in this concept of spatial form” (133), holding that Frank’s notions of identity and juxtaposition “are not as synonymous as the quotations apparently would like us to believe” (134). His argument against Frank amounts to a resistance against the reduction of narrative sequentiality: “in order to read a pattern or experience a juxtaposition, even of an explicitly pictorial kind, one has to move from one point to another, since one cannot assimilate it holistically” (134). It seems to me, however, that what Frank attempts to describe is a form of narrative projection. The complete textual syntagm of A la recherche du temps perdu projects several contrasting character frames (→ paradigmatic difference) on the same characters (→ paradigmatic similarity). Frank highlights that Proust “juxtaposes” the contrasting character frames, thereby breaking the chain of linearity. It is this “discontinuous” representation of the characters that reduces narrative sequentiality and creates instead sharp contrasts (and not transitions) between temporally punctual images of the characters. One cannot deny, of course, that these character images are dispersed on (or anchored in) the narrative time line. Accordingly, one would misread Frank, I think, by assuming that his analysis is directed against narrative linearity as such, since Proust’s character presentation does (of course) not eliminate narrative sequence. But what Frank draws attention to is the cognitive superimposition of contrasting character frames, the interplay of their paradigmatic similarity and difference, triggered by Proust’s discontinuous character representation. The metaphor of space, used by Frank, thus seems to be geared towards a dynamics on the paradigmatic axis, i.e. towards the overfilling of paradigmatic (cognitive) schema slots. Sturgess seems to misunderstand this, as he writes: “The word ‘identity’ suggests superimposition, and hence represses

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the idea of a pattern in space, whereas the word ‘juxtapose’ seems to entail the idea of such a pattern” (134). Frank’s idea of spatial form indeed does not refer to a “pattern in space”, but to a dynamic of narrative projection whereby elements of the narrative syntagm become cognitively “superimposed” (→ spatial metaphor) on the paradigmatic axis. If Frank downplays narrative sequentiality in favour of narrative spatiality, then only inasmuch as the cognitive superimposition (or “simultaneity”, as one could say, using a temporal metaphor) of contrasting character frames is itself indifferent to the origins of these frames in the narrative time line. Narrative projection, as a narratological concept, is thus capable of both clarifying Frank’s theoretical statements and correcting Sturgess’s misunderstanding. My second example for the usefulness of the concept of narrative projection draws on Warning’s reading of the story of Les Liaisons dangereuses as a struggle for felicity (“Kampf um Glückserfahrungen”, 2007, 394). Warning’s analysis of the epistolary communication, especially between Valmont/Merteuil and Valmont/Tourvel, is centred on Castoriadis’s concept of the imaginary (“das Imaginäre”) according to which the psyche is haunted by a desire of selfunification – a “folie unificatrice” –, which manifests itself in the workings of the imaginary. Amour-propre works towards the satisfaction of this desire, but, since it has no means of achieving this goal, it substitutes the (unachievable) self-unification by performances of the imaginary. Writing (letters) is one of these performances of the imaginary.179 Warning describes Valmont’s scripture as follows: “Sein Ort ist das Imaginäre des amour-propre, der auf Zeit durchaus und gerade die Intimität des ‘Du und kein anderer’ wollen kann”180 (2007, 398). If amour-propre is, according to moralistic descriptions, characterised by the fact that it is a multiplicity, that is, the source of a range of contrary behaviours, feelings and paradoxes (see Warning 2007, 397), then it cannot make the imaginary homogenise the terms of these paradoxes, but only create imaginary negotiations between them, by means of scripture. Felicity – “Glück” – can thus not be rationalised and represented in a tractate, but enacted by acts of writing (which are not “symbolic” in nature, but “imaginary”). For example, amour-propre divides the imaginary idea of felicity into plaisir and amour. This conceptual divide cannot be overcome so as to create a

179 As Warning writes, with regard to Valmont’s letters: “[. . .] dieses Schreiben ist amourpropre-stimulierte Performanz, und darin das, was Luhmann als Steigerung ins Imaginäre anspricht” (2007, 398; “this writing is a performance, stimulated by amour-propre, and hence represents what Luhmann calls ascension to the imaginary”, translation mine). 180 “Its place is the imaginary of the amour-propre, which is susceptible, for a time, to desire indeed – and especially – the intimacy of the ‘you and no one else’” (translation mine).

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consistent, non-contradictory idea of happiness through intimacy. Consequently, “intimacy is not susceptible of being encoded; it has to be processed paradigmatically” (“[. . .] läßt sich Intimität nicht kodieren, sondern nur paradigmatisch prozessieren”, 399). This “paradigmatic processing” takes the form of the telling of stories that explore the possible constellations that might emerge from the conceptual friction between pleasure and love, i.e. from the “Leitdifferenz plaisir/amour” (397). This Leitdifferenz is presented as a motive that undergoes variations (“Thema mit Variationen”, 398) inasmuch as the characters conceptualise ideas such as tranquillité, plaisir, or bonheur differently181 throughout the story. As the expressions “paradigmatic processing” (399) and “paradigmatic telling” (394) suggest, Warning’s approach highlights the paradigmatic side of narrative negotiations. As far as I see, at least some parts of his analysis can indeed be conceptualised (and thus perhaps more easily understood) as presenting forms of narrative projection (see Figure 19). Figure 19 shows that Warning focuses in his analysis on a specific topic frame: felicity (or happiness).182 Although this decision can be legitimated by the text, it represents a top-down approach to the matter, motivated by Warning’s research on the complementarity of discursive knowledge and narrative fiction. This complementarity manifests itself in fictional negotiations of the topic of felicity in the literature of the eighteenth century (see Warning 2007, 378). Felicity is thus placed at the upper end of Figure 19 (which tends towards the pole of cognition); it can be considered to originate in the cognitive generic schema of narrative to the extent that the latter is endowed with a conceptual slot for the topic of a narrative. For Warning, the topic of the novel is the amour-propre, which aspires towards felicity, on the level of the “imaginary”, through acts of writing. Warning (2007, 399–403) focuses especially on the epistolary communication and relationship between Merteuil and Valmont. If one seeks to understand their “struggle for felicity” (“Kampf um Glückserfahrungen”, 394), one needs to reconstruct their backstory, i.e. their common past, which is present in Les Liaisons dangereuses only in the form of “allusions” (400) to their former relationship and its end. Although an understanding of their common past is indispensable for any conceptualisation of the relationship Valmont-Merteuil, the backstory of these

181 “Differently” refers, on the one hand, to the changes and contrasts that concern a particular character, whose attitudes and feelings undergo changes, and, on the other hand, to the contrasts that exist between several characters. 182 “Ich will [. . .] nicht die Geschichte als einen dramatischen Kampf mit der ‘déclaration de guerre’ als ihrem Scheitelpunkt verfolgen, sondern sie lesen als einen Kampf um Glückserfahrungen” (Warning 2007, 394; “I am interested [. . .] not in reading the story as a dramatic fight, which reaches its zenith in the ‘déclaration de guerre’, but as a fight for experiencing felicity”).

V3: P[A]V

V4: A[P]V

(of the slot of the topic "felicity") amour (A)

2nd paradigm

Narrrative syntagm (provided narrative information)

Relationship Merteuil / Valmont: Backstory

V2: A[P]M

contrast competition ambivalence

"Leitdifferenz":

Figure 19: Narrative Projection of two “topic” subframes, based on Warning (2007).

V1: P[A]M

(of the slot of the topic "felicity") plaisir (P)

1st paradigm

felicity

topic

Narrative (expected narrative information)

Les Liaisons dangereuses

"Paradigmatic processing" of the "Leitdifferenz" between plaisir (P) and amour (A) through four "variations" (V1-4)

rivalling narrative subframes which compete for filling the narrative frame of felicity

narrative topic frame activated by the text

conceptual slot of the narrative schema

generic schema

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characters represents a “blank” (401). This blank is overfilled, in a way, by several backstories, which can be reconstructed from the narrative elements that are dispersed on the temporal axis of the novel (see Warning 2007, 399). Drawing on Iser’s notion of “blank”, one could say that the inconsistent bits of information presented by the narrative syntagm can be potentially connected in different ways as to allow for the emergence of four different stories (which are not enumerated, but hinted at by Warning [2007, 400] under the heading of an interpretative “circle”). The four stories live through their contrast between two concepts that compete for providing or defining (i.e., for filling the slot of) felicity: plaisir (P) versus amour (A). Felicity thus becomes ambiguous in the narrative: it denotes the two concepts simultaneously. Nonetheless, they are incompatible inasmuch as they originate in the paradigmatic opposition of the ideologies of libertinage (→ plaisir) and sensibility (→ amour) (see Warning 2007, 393–394). This ambiguous splitting of felicity can be traced back to the moribund folie unificatrice and to the amour-propre, which answers the psyche’s insatiable desire for unity by the creation of imaginary “paradoxes” (399) – or (as I would put it) of paradigmatic contrasts. What is important is that, according to Warning, these paradoxes or paradigmatic contrasts do not become synthesised by the narrative. Instead, the novel explores the friction and competition between amour and plaisir by (allowing for) the creation of four (interpretative) variations on the backstory Valmont-Merteuil (V1–4). The first variation (V1) tells a story according to which Merteuil (M) did not conceptualise her relationship with Valmont, before their break-up, as amour, but as plaisir (P), which would make her a “consequent libertine” (“konsequente Libertine”, 400). According to Warning, sentences such as the following, written by Merteuil, create this narrative variation: “vous et moi scellâmes si gaiement et de la même manière notre éternelle rupture” (quoted in Warning 2007, 400). There are however clues for the existence of amour ([a]), which question the concept of plaisir and project themselves on the slot of felicity as well. For example, it is difficult to integrate Merteuil’s extreme jealousy into the picture of a relationship based exclusively on plaisir (see Warning 2007, 400). As a result, Merteuil’s plaisir story (V1) is overshadowed by the suspicion of a love story (P[A]). Accordingly, the text legitimates a second narrative variation (V2), which tells the story of a Merteuil whose felicity with Valmont, previous to their breakup, did not originate in plaisir, but in an amour (A). Consider, for instance, the cruelty by which she sacrifices Tourvel. This cruelty can be interpreted as originating in her love for Valmont according to which she considers Tourvel as her rival, as the woman who replaces her within the love relationship with Valmont. But doubts – and thus the tension between amour and plaisir – remain as she constantly ranks plaisir higher than amour (A[P]).

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The same “circular” (400) structure of interpretation also creates the narrative variations V3 and V4, centred on Valmont: “Valmont sucht die ‘première liaison’ selbst gut libertinistisch unter das Zeichen eines illusionslosen ‘plaisir’ zu stellen”183 (thus creating V3 where P overrules the hypothesis of A), “die ‘rupture’ aber als illusionäre Fehlleistung abzutun, womit er sich in einen performativen Widerspruch verstrickt”184 (400) (thus creating the antagonist story V4 where A overrules P). Warning’s analysis can be summarised in terms of two types of narrative projection. On the one hand, several stories compete to fill the backstory of Valmont and Merteuil, thus presenting an example of narrative projection on the level of plot, i.e. a form of plot ambiguity. On the other hand, the competition between these stories arises from a more fundamental ambiguity, namely from felicity as (sentimental) amour versus (libertine) plaisir. What Warning calls “paradigmatic processing” or “telling in the paradigm” represents the link between these two forms of narrative projection: the text explores syntagmatically the paradigmatic opposition and competition between two concepts of felicity through a “structure of varied repetition” (“Struktur variierender Repetition”, 394), the latter consisting of a number of mutually exclusive backstories each of which exemplifies the tension between amour and plaisir. To conclude this chapter on narrative projection, I would like to draw attention to the fact that narrative projection describes a basic narrative mechanism that characterises further narratological concepts. One example in case are two concepts described by Herman (2002), namely polychrony (more precisely, temporal multiplicity) and double deixis. As to the former, Herman characterises “narratives that order events in a fuzzy or indeterminate way as stories engaging in a ‘polychronic’ style of narration” (Herman 2002, 212). Polychrony can take different forms, but one of them is due to narrative projection, namely temporal multiplicity – a phenomenon according to which “the narration anchors events in multiple temporal frameworks and thereby promotes competing ways of sequencing those events” (219, emphasis mine). In the italicised expressions, basic characteristics of ambiguity, namely multiplicity and competition can be recognised. In other words, there is not a 1:1 correspondence between event frame and time frame. In terms of narrative projection, one could characterise temporal multiplicity such that the time slot of an event is overfilled by the activation of several, competing time frames.

183 “Valmont seeks to present the ‘première liaison’, in the libertine way, as a disenchanted plaisir, but to discard the ‘rupture’ as an illusionary misperformance [. . .]”. 184 “[. . .] thereby becoming entangled in a performative contradiction.”

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Herman’s “double deixis”, for its part, concerns second-person narration and is based on the use of the pronoun “you”. As a rule, this pronoun can be an “address to or by the members of some fictional world” (called “fictionalized” and “horizontal address”) (341), including a “particular fictional protagonist in the act of self-address” (344, italics by Herman) or an “address that exceeds the frame (or ontological threshold) of a fiction to reach the audience, thus constituting ‘vertical’ address” (called “actualized address”) (see Herman 2002, 341). Double deixis, by contrast, is a special case insofar as it describes the “superimposition of deictic roles” (345). It is a phenomenon according to which “on some occasions you functions as a cue for superimposing two or more deictic roles, one internal to the storyworld represented in or through the diegesis and the other(s) external to that storyworld” (343). Double deictic “you” thus creates ambiguity. What lies at the heart of this phenomenon is the dynamics of narrative projection. The addressee frame of the narrative, which is activated by the pronoun “you”, is overfilled by more than one character frame. These frames compete for filling the corresponding slot, one character frame stemming from the intradiegetic universe, the other from the outerdiegetic world. To sum up, as a principle that underlies a wide range of narrative phenomena, narrative projection can be considered as one way of analysing negotiations between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, which take place at the nexus of text and cognition. It can thus be regarded as an important, widespread dynamic of coherence in progress, which governs narrativity and contributes, through the ambiguity that it creates, to its literary value – at least in the perception of some readers.

5 “Narrative Withdrawal”: Kafka’s Schloss 5.1 5.2 5.2.1 5.2.2 5.2.3 5.3 5.3.1 5.3.2 5.3.3 5.3.4 5.3.5 5.3.6 5.3.7 5.4 5.4.1 5.4.2 5.4.3 5.4.4 5.4.5 5.4.6 5.4.7 5.4.8 5.4.9 5.4.10 5.5 5.5.1 5.5.2 5.5.3

On the difficulty of writing about Kafka (today) 400 Narratological approaches to Kafka’s narratives and to Das Schloss 411 Das Schloss: Some preliminary remarks 411 Kafka, used as an exemplification for narrative theories 412 Narratological Kafka studies: The question of perspective 418 Kafka: An “antinarrative” novelist? A strange kind of emplotment 425 The difficulty of a summary 425 Eventfulness 427 A “plotless” narrative? 429 Syntagmatic “flatness”: Teleology, iteration and episodic linearity 430 Causality 433 Surprise and curiosity 435 A paradigmatic plot 437 Techniques and effects of narrative withdrawal 439 Withdrawal of meaning and allegorical interpretations 439 Withdrawal of consistency 441 Contradictions: Entries into the interpretative burrow 447 Withdrawal of contradictions: Conceptual drift 452 Emerging feelings of reception: The “Kafkaesque” experience 457 Inversions 459 Play with dichotomies 461 Metaleptic language use: The relationship between the castle and The Castle 468 Countermanding speech-acts: The Bürgel episode 470 Problems of interpretation: Reframing and Deframing 471 Narrative withdrawal: Incompatible with meaningfulness and representation? 480 Between meta-dichotomies: Meaning versus absurdity, negative versus affirmative thinking 480 Crisis of representation and performativity 485 Language games: Kafka’s “logic of signifiers” 487

5.1 On the difficulty of writing about Kafka (today) In several regards, Kafka has a special status. Firstly, the name Kafka denotes not only one of the most important authors of world literature, but also a “metaliterary [. . .] discursive event” (Liebrand 2006, 7, translation mine), encapsulated in the adjective “Kafkaesque”. Secondly, while Kafka is an important representative of Classical Modernity, whose work is pervaded by references to literary and non-literary texts and discourses of the turn of the century, his cultural significance is often considered to reach beyond its literary-historical origins (see 7–8). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-006

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Thirdly, there is an astonishing imbalance between the comparatively narrow volume of his literary works and the “gigantic” (see 9) dimensions of the research literature on Kafka, which represent a challenge to every scholar who wants to do reliable research on Kafka. Lamentations on the immense diversity of approaches have therefore become, since Politzer’s remarks on that subject,1 commonplace in the research literature. This proliferation of interpretative approaches can surely be traced back, on the one hand, to the considerable difficulty and consistently enigmatic quality of Kafka’s work, which does not cease to fascinate readers; on the other hand, it seems to be due to another special quality of Kafka’s literature, namely its almost uncanny versatility. His texts seem to have the capacity of illuminating or illustrating the most diverse facets of reality, thus revealing an extraordinary potential of (re-)actualisation, which invites professional readers to approach them in the most diverse (religious, historical, literary, political, philosophical, psychological etc.) contexts. It may be due to this particularity of Kafka that general methodological and hermeneutic problems, with which professional readers are necessarily confronted in their daily interpretative work, gain special acuity when it comes to the interpretation of Kafka’s narratives. This preface aims to shortly discuss some of these hermeneutic and methodological difficulties, out of a concern for scientific transparency and self-reflection. The urgent need for methodological self-reflection in the research on Kafka’s literature has been highlighted inter alia by Beicken (1974) who criticises, throughout his study, a bad habit in the research community, namely the practice of projecting ready-made (philosophical, theological or other) systems of thought onto Kafka’s texts at the expense of the texts’ particularity. Many have echoed Beicken’s position, also with regard to Das Schloss: Sheppard (1979, 445), for instance, states that one should not subject the text of the novel to “a prestructured conceptualisation” and Müller (2008, 528) criticises the practice of “squeezing” the text into pre-established “interpretative frames” (translations mine). Such criticism is directed primarily at allegorical interpretations (see section 5.4.1) of Kafka’s texts, which seem to lure readers,2 but which fail to do

1 “Eine Sammlung kritischer Texte über Kafka hatte es [. . .] mit sich ebenso schwer wie mit dem Leser, an den sie sich wenden wollte. Zwar bietet sie sich chronologisch dar [. . .], aber sie konnte bei der schier unübersehbaren Fülle des Materials weder den Anspruch erheben, systematisch zu sein, noch hatte sie die Absicht, die geradezu globale Wirkungsgeschichte ihres Autors auch nur andeutungsweise aufzuzeigen” (Politzer 1973b, IX). 2 As Robbe-Grillet explains, “[n]on-sense, a-causality, and the void irresistibly attract higher worlds and supernatures. [/] Kafka’s misfortune in this realm is exemplary” (1989, 164).

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justice to the texts themselves. Robbe-Grillet explains that, if Kafka’s narratives were merely allegories, they would [. . .] require an explanation (which would summarize them perfectly, to the point where their entire content would be exhausted), but further, this signification would destroy in a radical way the tangible universe which constituted their texture. Thus literature would always consist, and in a systematic way, in speaking of something else. There would be a present world and a real world; the first would be the visible one, the second the only important one. The novelist’s role would be that of an intercessor: by a fake description of visible things – themselves entirely futile – he would evoke the “reality” hidden behind. Now, on the contrary, if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced reading convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. (Robbe-Grillet 1989, 164–165, orig. emphasis)

Another problem is posed by the question of what should the goal of one’s interpretative activities be. Beicken argues that researchers have to make a true interpretative effort by working out a full-blown interpretation, which connects the results of structural, linguistic and literary analyses with “the broader frame of the texts, namely [with] their contexts given by the history of thoughts and social life” (108, translation mine). For Beicken, an adequate interpretation has to transcend immanent textual analysis by taking into account the history of the text’s reception and the position that the aesthetic work of art occupies within social phenomena and constellations. Moreover, as Beicken argues, aesthetic phenomena can only be evaluated adequately if one illuminates the connection between textual phenomena and social3 reality (see Beicken 1974, 108). Beicken also requires researchers not to restrict the scope of their reflections to particular texts, but to adopt a broad perspective that takes the entirety of Kafka’s works into consideration. As alluring as such an interpretative ideal is, it is problematic in at least two regards. On the one hand, Beicken’s criteria can hardly be met with limited temporal resources. On the other hand, Beicken’s requirements seem to rely on the idea that researchers should “bring forth” research on Kafka. In 1974, one could perhaps still believe in the possibility of surveying the research on Kafka and of collectively “making progress”; but today, the idea of collective progress seems somehow illusionary with regard to the extraordinary mass of research literature that has been produced in the last decades. This incompatibility of scientific ambition and temporal resources may be one of the reasons why the complaints about the unmasterable mass of research literature are ubiquitous. These complaints reflect a veritable dilemma for scholars (me included): we want to do

3 Social reality has to be understood here probably in the broad sense that Schleiermacher (1977), for example, gives to it, such that it includes historical-epochal, linguistic, literary, societal and national phenomena.

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reliable research, that is, review (and position ourselves towards) the history of research, but finally we have to realise that limited temporal resources do not comply with these intentions, thus thwarting the scientific enterprise. It is important to make this dilemma explicit, because it influences methodological and hermeneutic decisions, for instance, the definition of one’s interpretative goal. The decision for a structural analysis and against a full-blown interpretation, for instance, might be understood as an attempt of preserving scientific integrity in view of the above-mentioned temporal dilemma. Close reading and textimmanent analysis allow meeting requirements of scientificity while being much less reliant upon the history of research (and thus much less time-consuming) than hypotheses about the overall signification of a work written by Kafka. Beicken’s criteria pose a further question. Where exactly is the boundary that separates what a researcher has to take into consideration from that which he can leave out of consideration? Are not all of Kafka’s biographical experiences, including all the cultural (literary, religious, philosophical, etc.) and personal influences he has undergone, all the things he believed in or rejected and he has been preoccupied by – in a nutshell: Kafka’s whole “experientiality”4 – significant contexts of his works? If so, are we not obliged to try to explore all of them?5 But is it possible at all – and necessary? – to fuse one’s own way of thinking, one’s own knowledge completely with Kafka’s in order to acquire the right to write about his literature? These questions lead us directly into hermeneutic debates culminating with various answers. These debates often amount to propositions on how the activities of “understanding”, “interpreting” and “explaining” are – or should be – understood. Schleiermacher (1977), for instance, requires, in his conception of hermeneutics as the “art” of interpretation, that one should understand the text first as well as and then even better than the author, notably by acquiring a quasi-perfect knowledge of the author’s language and of his/her “interior and exterior life” (“Kenntnis seines inneren und äußeren Lebens”, 94). In a 4 I am drawing here on Caracciolo’s (2014) notion of experientiality (see section 3.5.6). 5 I find however some reasonability in Walser’s (1992, 9) argument. Walser contests the pertinence of Kafka’s biography for his literary art, seeing the central criterion for high literary quality in the artwork’s autonomy and independence from the artist’s personality: “Je vollkommener die Dichtung ist, desto weniger verweist sie auf den Dichter. [. . .] Franz Kafka ist ein Dichter, der seine Erfahrung so vollkommen bewältigt hat, daß der Rückgriff auf das Biographische überflüssig ist.” Or, as he puts it some pages later: “Bei Kafka muß man das Leben aus dem Werk erklären, während das Werk auf die Erhellung durch die biographische Wirklichkeit verzichten kann” (1992, 16). As Walser shows, Kafka’s whole personality and life has been shaped by his literary aspirations, such that even references to his biography refer back to literature. Walser (1992, 11) thus speaks about Kafka’s “poetic personality”.

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similar manner, other hermeneutic approaches, such as those presented by Jauß and Gadamer, theorise meaning in terms of a fusion of the horizons of the reader and of the author (see Jannidis et al. 2003, 10). But this view has not gone unchallenged. A counter-position has been defended, for example, by Ricœur: Avec le discours écrit, l’intention de l’auteur et l’intention du texte cessent de coïncider. Cette dissociation de la signification verbale du texte et de l’intention mentale constitue l’enjeu véritable de l’inscription du discours. Ce n’est pas que nous puissions concevoir un texte sans auteur; le lien entre le locuteur et le discours n’est pas aboli, mais distendu et compliqué. La dissociation de la signification et de l’intention reste une aventure du renvoi du discours au sujet parlant. Mais la carrière du texte échappe à l’horizon fini vécu par son auteur. Ce que dit le texte importe davantage que ce que l’auteur a voulu dire; désormais toute exégèse déploie ses procédures au sein de la circonscription de signification qui a rompu ses amarres avec la psychologie de son auteur. (Ricœur 1986, 187, emphasis mine)6

Ricœur distances himself from any “ideology of an absolute text”, which, as he puts it, “fail[s] to be about something” (1973, 96). Nonetheless, he argues that “the referent of all literature” is “no longer the Umwelt of the ostensive references of dialogue but the Welt7 projected by the nonostensive references of every text that we have read, understood, and loved. To understand a text is at the same time to light up our own situation” (96, emphasis mine). Ricœur’s ideas are in two respects important especially for Kafka. On the one hand, Ricœur’s “nonostensive references” correspond to a specific characteristic of Kafka’s texts. As Beicken (1974, 106–107) has argued, Kafka’s parables are characterised by decontextualisation: in the creative or editorial process, Kafka eliminates deliberately original textual frames or elements that would allow readers to connect the parables to a specific subject or outer-textual reality.8 Moreover,

6 “With written discourse, the author’s intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide. This dissociation of the verbal meaning of the text and the mental intention is what is really at stake in the inscription of discourse. Not that we can conceive of a text without an author; the tie between the speaker and the discourse is not abolished, but distended and complicated. The dissociation of the meaning and the intention is still an adventure of the reference of discourse to the speaking subject. But the text’s career escapes the finite horizon of its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of its author” (Ricœur 1973, 95, emphasis mine). 7 Ricœur’s “Welt” obviously foreshadows Lotman’s (1977) “secondary modelling system”. 8 As Beicken (1974, 105–106) explains, the parable Die Bäume has originally been embedded in a text that denounces the “uselessness of what people build up and produce” (“Unbrauchbarkeit dessen, was die Menschen bauen und produzieren”, Beicken 1974, 106). Kafka has then extracted

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it seems to be a specific characteristic of Kafka’s texts that they cue scholars to approach them in a way which “lights up” their “own situation”, such that they contextualise Kafka’s texts in terms of their own interests, insights or problems. As Lehmann (2006, 98) puts it: “Kafkas Texte haben die Eigenschaft, gerade durch den Entzug der Referenz die Projektion von Sinn anzuziehen”.9 This more or less subjective projection of meaning onto Kafka’s texts has often (legitimately) been criticised. Beicken considers philological improbity to arise as soon as the critic’s “Vorverständnis” (i.e. the ideas that preempt the philological work on the text) makes the respective scholar blind to the text’s peculiarities (see Beicken 1974, 99–100). Although I agree with this criticism, it should be noted that the wide-spread tendency of interpreting Kafka in terms of personal interests is apparently not only due to the researchers, but also to the texts themselves. As Falk points out, Kafka’s texts seem to have the particular capacity of inciting readers to blend textual structures with individual problems and interests: Man muß tatsächlich annehmen, daß Kafka seinen Dichtungen die Fähigkeit mitgegeben hat, Leser in ihrem persönlichen Sein anzurufen. Anscheinend geht der Ruf durch die jeweilige Interessenlage des Lesers hindurch. Diese erlangt erst wieder Bedeutung, wenn ein Nachdenken über das Gelesene einsetzt und eine Deutung ausgearbeitet wird. Dann scheint es immer wieder zu einem seltsamen Prozeß zu kommen: Für den Deutenden treten seine eigenen individuellen Probleme in den Vordergrund und allmählich wird Kafka fast zu einem bloßen Anlaß für eine Selbstdarstellung. Die Verfasser der Schriften über Kafka sind sich dieses Vorgangs unmittelbar kaum bewußt geworden. Bei deren Ausarbeitung meinten sie wohl alle, endlich einen besseren Ansatz zur Kafkadeutung gefunden zu haben, vielleicht sogar den einen, (Falk 1990, 12) wirklich adäquaten.10

the parable from the text, publishing it, in 1913, without its original context. As Beicken (1974, 106) observes, the high degree of abstractness – or, as Ricœur would put it, of “nonostensive” referentiality – that results from this strategy of decontextualisation is typical for Kafka’s parables. 9 “What is typical for Kafka’s texts is the way they attract the projection of meaning by their withdrawal of reference” (translation mine). 10 “One has to assume indeed that Kafka has provided his literature with the capacity of invocating readers in their [most] intimate reality. This invocation passes apparently through each reader’s constellation of interests. This constellation becomes significant again as the reader ponders what s/he has been reading, and as s/he works out an interpretation. Then, a curious process produces itself again and again: The interpreter’s own, individual problems come to the fore and, gradually, the interpretation of Kafka transforms itself into a self-portrayal. [/] These authors do not seem to have perceived this process consciously. Apparently, all of them have been convinced, during the process of writing, that they have, finally, found a better approach to Kafka, perhaps even one which would be really adequate” (translation mine).

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But if interpretation merges with the discussion of personal problems, an unbridled proliferation of interpretative meanings is inevitable. Politzer discusses this problem, adopting a resigning attitude towards this fact: Im Grunde werden sie [Kafka’s Parabeln, ESW] ebenso viele Deutungen wie Leser finden. Die Offenheit ihrer Form erlaubt dem Leser eine totale Projektion seines eigenen Dilemmas auf die Seiten Franz Kafkas. Diese Parabeln sind ‘Rorschachtests’ der Literatur und ihre Deutung sagt mehr über den Charakter ihrer Deuter als über das Wesen ihres Schöpfers.11 (Politzer 1965, 43)

Beicken’s, Politzer’s as well as classical hermeneutic positions thus delegitimise a vast part ― if not the majority – of the research literature on Kafka, thereby raising considerably (but legitimately) the degree of difficulty of writing scientifically on Kafka at all. Ricœur’s position, however, sheds perhaps a new, more conciliatory light on the diversity of approaches. For Ricœur, it is exactly the text’s capacity of nurturing constantly new ways of meaning-making in new contexts in which the text’s “importance” resides: Une action importante [.. .] développe des significations qui peuvent être actualisées ou remplies dans des situations autres que celle dans laquelle l’action s’est produite. Pour dire la même chose autrement, la signification d’un événement important excède, dépasse, transcende les conditions sociales de sa production et peut être ré-effectuée dans de nouveaux contextes sociaux. Son importance consiste dans sa pertinence durable et, dans quelques cas, dans sa pertinence omnitemporelle. (Ricœur 1986, 196)12

One could thus say, with Ricœur, that the establishment of connections between Kafka’s texts and outer-textual contexts, which (eventually, probably or surely) transcend Kafka’s “horizon” or intentionality – we may think of the broad spectre of approaches which goes from Marxist to existentialist, absurd, nihilistic or poststructuralist approaches –, reveal the texts’ “omnitemporal relevance”. While Beicken legitimately criticises approaches that only search “the confirmation of their ready-made conceptions” (“die Bestätigung ihrer vorgefaßten Anschauungen”, 11 “Basically, they [Kafka’s parables, ESW] will find as many interpretations as readers. Their formal openness allows the reader to project his/her own dilemmas completely onto the side of Franz Kafka. Those parables are literary ‘inkblot tests’ and their interpretation says more about the personality of their interpreters than about the nature of their [the parable’s, ESW] creator” (translation mine). 12 “An important action [. . .] develops meanings which can be actualized or fulfilled in situations other than the one in which this action occurred. To say the same thing in different words, the meaning of an important event exceeds, overcomes, transcends the social conditions of its production and may be reenacted in new social contexts. Its importance is its durable relevance and, in some cases, its omnitemporal relevance” (Ricœur 1973, 102–103).

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Beicken 1974, 101), one could shift the perspective and argue, more positively, that these approaches do not only lay bare the texts’ (nearly uncanny) capacity of complying with the most diverse contexts,13 but that they also reveal the texts’ continuous “importance” (in Ricœur’s sense), interestingness and its nearly inexhaustible potential of actualisation. In fact, the impressive interpretative diversity lays bare the texts’ capacity of illuminating always new facets of reality, independent of a fixed epochal frame. This textual capacity, for its part, counts generally as a cornerstone of literary quality. While great parts of the research literature fail perhaps in developing reliable (in the sense of “objective”) hypotheses about textualauthorial meaning, they fulfil, in their diversity, another (unintended, quasi “collateral”) function: they provide Kafka’s texts with the high literary value that it has in fact today. As interesting as it is to observe these processes of literary valuation, canonisation and actualisation, the question of how Kafka can and should be interpreted and what “interpretation”, as a practice and a goal of one’s research activities, should concretely mean (and accomplish) remains open. If allegorical interpretations fail to do justice to the concrete textual gestalt, what constitutes a better kind of interpretation? Bühler (1999) has established a typology of seventeen different kinds of activities, which can be summarised under the notion of “interpretation”. He concludes his overview by calling into question the most common idea of interpretation, understood as the extrapolation of a meaning that could be paraphrased: Ich glaube [. . .] nicht, daß die Interpretationstätigkeit sich mit so etwas identifizieren lassen könnte wie damit, die Botschaft eines Textes zu finden, die dann vielleicht in einem Satz ausgedrückt wird und als Bedeutung des Textes gelten soll. Denn wozu ist der ganze Text denn [dann] verfaßt worden [. . .]? (Bühler 1999, 133–134)14

13 Indeed, this capacity of Kafka’s texts is perhaps not even that uncanny. If his texts present, as it has often been observed, an autonomous imagery, which lacks any concrete clue as to how these pictures should be “translated” to non-pictorial contents, then they offer an archive of pictures that call for metaphorical-allegorical use. The fact that researchers “hear” – and (at least until the 1960s) follow – this “call” can be explained by “the way we think” (I am alluding here to Fauconnier and Turner [2002]): if we live by metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest, then Kafka’s texts lend themselves to the illustration of – especially complex – ideas and matters, because they provide a complexly structured imagery. One might even defend the hypothesis that Kafka wanted his texts to be used this way – why else has he systematically decontextualised his parables (see below)? 14 “[. . .] I do not believe that the activity of interpretation can be equated with something such as ‘finding the message of a text,’ which is then summarised in a sentence and should count as the meaning of the text. Since for what purpose has the whole text then been written [. . .]?” (translation mine).

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Bühler’s very interesting question has also been posed by scholars who defend a structural-analytical rather than a strictly hermeneutic approach to Kafka. Beißner (1952, 6–9), for instance, criticises that researchers tend to “translate” Kafka’s texts into interpretative (religious, philosophical etc.) contents. He defends the work of the philologist who “does not seek to devaluate the shaped word as the – hastily dumped – husk of a conceptual ‘content’ (if one could call it that), but lingers over it and asks for its expressive value” (8, translation mine). For Beißner, it is such a philological approach alone that contributes to an understanding of what Kafka’s (primarily linguistic) “art” (9) consists of. He thus defends a kind of interpretation that aims to explain the artfulness and literary value of Kafka’s texts; in his eyes, this goal can best be reached through the analysis of literary forms.15 Beißner’s considerations imply an interpretative alternative, namely that between content-related versus form-related approaches.16 But does this alternative really exist? Ricœur (1986) argues that textual-structural analysis (called “explication” [“explanation”]) and processes of sense-making (called “comprehénsion” [“understanding”]) are (factually, not necessarily normatively) strongly interdependent, forming “two different stages of a unique hermeneutic arc” (Ricœur 1973, 113). This idea is, on an abstract level, quite convincing, but it seems to me that the practice of interpretation does not always comply with Ricœur’s model. For instance, in a publication that follows his famous narratological analysis, Beißner (1958) argues that the homogeneity of perspective, which he contends to be constitutive of Kafka’s art on a formal level, corresponds, on a content level, to a continuous thematic homogeneity, which he calls “miscarrying arrival or the missed target” (“mißlingende Ankunft oder das verfehlte Ziel”, Beißner 1958, 14). While Beißner’s hypothesis of a continuous homogeneity on the levels of both form and content does confirm Ricœur’s idea of an interdependency between form- and content-related hypotheses, the concrete content that Beißner

15 Beißner admires Kafka’s artful construction of a homogeneous perspectival structure, which is coupled with the protagonist. As he concludes (1952, 42), Kafka’s art consists in his eyes of “the transformation of an inner reality” (i.e. the reality of Kafka’s “soul”) into a homogeneously structured linguistic form (“die Verwandlung einer Wirklichkeit (einer Seelenwirklichkeit) in ein lückenlos strukturiertes Kunstgebilde der Sprache”). 16 It should be noted that Beißner himself does not discard content-related approaches – he even contends that researchers can and “even have to” consult at least the basic research literature on the theological, philosophical (etc.) fundaments of Kafka’s texts (see Beißner 1952, 8).

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identifies as the central subject of Kafka’s texts is indeed not specifically related to his formal analysis of perspective.17 What further broadens the gap between formal analysis and content-related interpretation is the specialisation of research on Kafka. The more research is done, the more details and facets of Kafka’s work are identified, which then become the subject of (more or less isolated) autonomous debates. Consider, for instance, Beißner’s thesis about Kafka’s perspectival Einsinnigkeit (i.e. homogenous interior focalisation, see section 5.2.3). His hypothesis has found various adherents and opponents18 and is now one of the most prominent examples of the highly specialised (here: formal) debates that do not aim at all at an allencompassing, “overarching”19 interpretation, which would link Ricœur’s explication and compréhension. One may regret this process of incremental specialisation. Nonetheless, this specialisation seems to be somehow logical and perhaps even inevitable since, if the ultimate ideal of interpretation is to develop hypotheses about textual meaning that comply with all textual facets and details, then the research on such details fulfils an important function for the long-term goal of interpreting Kafka. Considered from this angle, the grand diversity of approaches to Kafka can be understood to form a somehow necessary “division of labour”. The question is, however, who will finally reintegrate the pieces of divisional research back into an interpretative mosaic that would allow us to fully “understand” Kafka’s texts. It seems to me that the diversity of research – and the diversity of meanings that emerge from it – has become so enormous that the ideal of (even a tessellated) interpretative unity can hardly ever be achieved. I am, I suppose, not the only one to have such hermeneutic reservations and these misgivings may be a further reason why people do – quite unscrupulously – research on partial rather than global aspects of Kafka’s work, leaving behind the question of the goal(s), message(s) or the meaning(s) of his works. One could say that the textual-authorial “meaning” of Kafka’s narratives is, in a way, as unreachable as the castle of the eponymous novel20: as a goal or 17 The textual contents of Kafka’s narratives that are filtered, in Beißner’s view, through the perspectival “Einsinnigkeit” are indeed very diverse. Correspondingly, innumerable alternatives have been presented to Beißner’s hypothesis according to which the central content of Kafka’s texts is “miscarrying arrival”. 18 For an overview, see e.g. Zeller (1986) and Busse (2001). 19 The italics allude to Ricœur’s hermeneutic arc (see above). 20 I am intentionally blending some of the aspects of Kafka’s novel here with hermeneutic problems. The goal of this metaphorical use of Kafka’s text is, of course, not to interpret Kafka’s Schloss, but only to clarify my reflections on hermeneutic problems. But my metaphorical “reading” should also illustrate the idea, presented above, that the complex (spatial, semantic, etc.) relationships that Kafka’s novelistic imagery offers, provide a blueprint for the

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an ideal, it dominates and influences all of our various research activities, and in this regard, it is very real. But since we do not know whether it can really ever be achieved, and since only its achievement would provide it with reality, its ontic status is simultaneously very precarious. Furthermore, if, in this analogy, we scholars represent the villagers (or K.), and if the castle represents the “meaning” of Kafka’s text(s), then another parallel can be drawn: just as K., standing in the village, perceives the castle as being astonishingly similar to the diversity of village houses, that is, to the village itself, scholars can perceive the meaning of K.’s texts as resembling the irreducible diversity of meanings produced (or laid bare) by the research community itself. The ideal of a “higher”, unitary, accessible meaning can accordingly be a mere chimaera, which is as much a product of discourse as the castle.21 If the ideal of “understanding” Kafka refers to this chimaera, it can be an impossibility, and interpretation – in Bühler’s seventeen variants, including analysis – could be all that we scholars can do. Considered from this angle, writing a chapter on Kafka is possible, but not in an “objective”, unbiased and scientifically fully satisfying manner. Interpretative research on Kafka is neatly interwoven with a bundle of hermeneutic (or antihermeneutic) convictions, epistemological assumptions and methodological choices. Making one’s biases explicit thus has to be the first step of any interpretation or analysis. This is why I would like to lay bare two of my biased choices. On the one hand, I am concentrating primarily on a single text, namely on Das Schloss22 (The castle), written in 1922 (that is, two years before his death). Being Kafka’s last novelistic enterprise and thus, as Walser (1992) has suggested, the most developed, purest expression of his poetics, I hope to gain insights into what is at the heart of Kafka’s narrativity. By establishing (though sparingly) connections between the novel and other texts of Kafka, I hope to circumvent the trap of developing a too narrow, punctual analysis. Moreover, I hope to prove the pertinence of my observations for an understanding of Kafka’s narrativity in general. On the other hand, I will provide a (narratological) analysis rather than a conclusive interpretation (although there will be overlaps between the two). I have four reasons for my decision for a narratological approach. Firstly, the

vivid (metaphorical, pictorial) expression of complex matters. Recently, Kleinwort (2014) even blended the relationship between the castle and the village with the editorial history of the novel. 21 Many researchers have justly pointed to the fact that the concept of the castle is produced primarily by the ways in which the villagers talk about it; see, for instance, Kellerwessel (1991). 22 I will refer to the novelistic fragment as Das Schloss, because, as Schuster (2012, 123) has pointed out, Das Schloß (with “ß”) is a construction of the editors of the critical edition and does not appear in Kafka’s handwritten fragment.

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project of developing an overarching theory on the “meaning” of The Castle could not have been realised, neither with the temporal resources nor within the limited confines of this chapter. I am thus hoping to make a minor contribution by placing more emphasis on textual analysis. Secondly, Kafka is of special importance for my theoretical model and hypotheses, and that in two regards. On the one hand, the singularity of Kafka’s narrativity challenges established conceptions of narrativity, thus calling for new ways of theorising narrativity in general. On the other hand, Kafka occupies, within my theoretical framework, a very prominent position insofar as Das Schloss represents perhaps the most compelling example of a text that triggers processes of coherence in progress (see chapter 3), this notion being at the heart of narrativity actualisation and of the performative pole of narrativity. Thirdly, research on Kafka in general and on Das Schloss in particular has laid bare poetic mechanisms and textual strategies whose pertinence for the question of narrativity have not yet been acknowledged. In other words, there yawns a gap between purely “narratological” and “interpretative” research on Kafka. The present chapter aims to close this gap. Despite the generally analytical design of my approach, I will therefore also explore ways in which my narratological analysis could be related to interpretative, content-related hypotheses, thereby aiming at what Ricœur calls the “hermeneutic arc”: unity or interdependency of analysis and interpretation, of compréhension and explication. While I have obvious reservations against the ideal of finding “the” meaning of the novel, susceptible of being paraphrased in a single sentence, I do of course not reject the search for meaning (i.e. philological coherence in progress). Sharing Walser’s (1992, 123–125) view that reliable textual analysis can serve as a valuable basis for further research, I hope to make a (minor, but hopefully valuable) contribution to the everexpanding mosaic of research.

5.2 Narratological approaches to Kafka’s narratives and to Das Schloss 5.2.1 Das Schloss: Some preliminary remarks Before one can start to discuss Das Schloss,23 first published in 1926 by Max Brod, one is well advised to take into consideration not only the biographical context surrounding Kafka’s writing of Das Schloss – the end of his relationship

23 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Jürgen Born and others (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1982–).

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with Felice Bauer, his acquaintanceship with Milena Jesenská,24 his nervous breakdown, his temporary suspension of literary activities and finally his stay in Spindelmühle-Friedrichstal –,25 but also the editorial history of the novel, which has to come to terms with its fragmentary nature and with the (more or less substantial) modifications that Kafka’s handwritten manuscript has undergone in Brod’s and Pasley’s editions.26 Since these aspects have already been sufficiently discussed in the research literature, and since they are only of secondary importance for my analysis, I will not elaborate on these issues here. I would just like to state that this chapter had been finished before the facsimile of Kafka’s manuscript has been edited by the historical-critical (FKA) edition of Reuß und Staengle at Stroemfeld in 2018, such that I will quote from Pasley’s (KKA) edition, which is of high repute (see e.g. Liebrand 2006, 9). 5.2.2 Kafka, used as an exemplification for narrative theories One can distinguish two ways by which Kafka’s narratives and especially his last novelistic fragment have been made the object of narratological analysis. On the one hand, there are scholars who are primarily narratologists and refer to Kafka in order to exemplify aspects of their theoretical framework. On the other hand, there are scholars who primarily conduct research on Kafka and decide to take an analytical-narratological perspective. I would like to have a quick look at some of the approaches that pertain to the first group. As both Busse (2001, 26) and Schuster (2012, 68–78) have stated, classical narratological theorists have referred to Kafka in order to exemplify their theoretical assumptions. For Stanzel (1984 [1979]), for instance, Kafka’s novels exemplify slides between authorial and figural narration (personale Erzählsituation), with

References in each case are to the ‘Textband’ unless indicated otherwise. References to the volumes of this edition are given in the main text, using the following abbreviations: Das Schloß (1983), ed. by Malcolm Pasley: S; Tagebücher (1990), ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley: T. I am working with two translations of the novel, those presented by Willa and Edwin Muir (abbreviated CA-M) and Mark Harman (abbreviated CA-H). 24 As Sheppard (1979) notes, Milena might have provided a model for the construction of Frieda. Walser (1992, 44–70), by contrast, denies the characters in Kafka’s novels any psychological, anthropological as well as natural-biological reality. He emphasises that the characters live only by the functions that they fulfil within the poetological system of the respective novel, thereby challenging the view that real-life models of the characters are of any importance. 25 See e.g. Sheppard’s (1979), Engel’s (2013) and Müller’s (2008) reconstructions. 26 See Schuster (2012, 123–164). Also Neumann (1990) discusses the beginning of Das Schloss in Kafka’s manuscript (the so-called Fürstenzimmer-Fragment).

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the protagonists serving as “reflectors”.27 Genette’s (1972; 1983) theory, especially his distinction between voice and focalisation, has often been invoked in order to analyse Kafka’s narratives (see below).28 In Nouveau Discours du récit (1983, 74–76), Genette himself draws shortly on Kafka, claiming that Kafka’s decision to switch from first- to third-person narration is not as significant as Dorrit Cohn suggests.29 Petersen (1993), for his part, analyses Kafka’s narratives in terms of “personal narration”.30 In “postclassical” narratology, references to Kafka serve often the same purpose; they should confirm the respective researchers’ theoretical models and claims. Sturgess (1992, 28) can serve as an example. He proposes to define narrativity as a logic, i.e. as a “higher-level causality” – obviously a kind of textual as well as authorial31 rationality, which he takes for granted –,32 which causes and 27 For Schuster (2012, 68–78), the central problem of Stanzel’s categorisation consists of an incompatibility between Stanzel’s concept of reflectorship and the idea of (un-)reliability: reflectors give an immediate, direct account of their perceptions and impressions, and that instantaneously, without strategic modifications. Insofar as the unreliability of K. plays an important role in Das Schloss (see below), Schuster considers Stanzel’s theoretical stance as problematical. This criticism, however, can be relativised in view of Engel’s (2013, 180) idea of double unreliability. He argues that not only intentional, but also unconscious, non-strategic distortions of reality, which are due to K.’s biased perspective, can be considered to represent an unreliable account of diegetic facts. Furthermore, Schuster (2012, 71) argues that the narrative perspective of the novel is not restricted to K. as a reflector and that the categorical distinctions that Stanzel’s model provides are not sufficient to describe the perspectival flexibility and ambiguity that characterises Das Schloss. It might be worth noting that Busse (2001, 19) contends that the design of Stanzel’s narrative theory provokes a polarisation in the research community between adherents and opponents of Beißner’s idea of Einsinnigkeit (see below). In her view, Stanzel’s model allows thinking of third-person narration only in the oppositional categories of either a figural or an auctorial-omniscient mode. 28 According to Zeller’s (1986, 278–279) analysis, for instance, the focalisation of Das Schloss is sometimes split between the narrator (external focalisation) and the character (internal focalisation). He contends that Das Schloss is primarily focalised through K., but adds that there are passages in which the point of view of either the narrator or another character becomes dominant. 29 Schuster (2012, 76), for his part, legitimately criticises Genette’s opinion with regard to the “far-reaching consequences” of Kafka’s modification. These consequences are analysed by Cohn (1968) and Schuster (2012, 169–181). 30 Schuster (2012, 78) criticises that Petersen overlooks passages in which either a proper narratorial perspective manifests itself or in which the standpoint of the focaliser cannot be determined unambiguously. As Schuster notes, Petersen’s clear-cut categories do thus not lend themselves easily to the description of this perspectival indeterminacy. 31 “What I am primarily interested in here is authorial power and intentionality as they fuse directly with the unfolding narrativity of any work” (Sturgess 1992, 62). He describes this power also as a “level of textual authority” (90). 32 Sturgess contends “that narrativity must be thought of as the enabling force of narrative, a force that is present at every point in the narrative and thus always operates syntagmatically” (1992, 28).

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gives sense to the gestalt of the narrative, including especially the way its discourse unfolds syntagmatically. He claims that “to read any narrative with a sense of its wholeness means to read its narrativity. This reading will itself produce a story – the story of narrativity – which will enhance, dramatize and above all provide a rationale for the story being told” (28). While lower-level causality refers to “represented causality” (i.e. causal relationships on the level of the fabula), higher-level causality refers to the reasons in terms of which the sjuzhet develops the way it does. He understands lower-level causality as a form of “narrative logic” (i.e. as the logic of what is represented on the level of the fabula) while higher-level causality refers to a “logic of narrativity” (i.e. to the logic of the sjuzhet, that is, the logic behind the “narrative logic”). According to Sturgess, even the most inconsistent narratives follow a “logic of narrativity”. This logic can, however, only be found “outside the text, in the logic of social life and formations – these may include literary formations – which influence or condition the way in which the text is produced” (54, here and hereafter translation mine). Considering Der Prozess and Das Schloss, Sturgess emphasises the fact that the protagonist himself engages in a process of rational enquiry. Consequently, “the narrative segments relate to or follow one another in accordance with the stages of rational enquiry which the world of the story undergoes” (32). Insofar as both the protagonist’s enquiry and the “logic of narrativity” live by syntagmatic progression, Sturgess sees a “close association between the logic of narrativity and the logic of represented narrative, between higher- and lower-level causality” in these novels (33). In my eyes, Sturgess’s terminology is misleading, especially in the context of Kafka’s novels. As many scholars have argued, Kafka’s novels withdraw causal links and consistency in general (see below) and serve thus rather as an example of narratives that do not proceed according to a visible “lower-level causality”. Sturgess’s concept of a “logic of narrativity”, for its part, mingles together the syntagmatic structure of the narrative discourse and an artistic will or intentionality (or a “level of textual authority”, 90), the latter being responsible for the former. Sturgess’s claim of a “close association” between “higher- and lowerlevel causality” is therefore ambiguous. Does he mean that K. discovers progressively a “logic” behind the events and that the higher-level “logic” or meaning of the narrative emerges in parallel? I would not agree with this hypothesis, since, as many scholars have convincingly claimed (see, e.g., Kellerwessel 1991; Zeller 1986), K. does not really make progress in his understanding of the village and the castle. Or does Sturgess mean to say that K.’s search for a sense behind the succession of events parallels the reader’s search for the

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sense behind the unfolding sjuzhet?33 This would, in my eyes, be a more valuable hypothesis, albeit not exactly a revolutionary one. In principle, Sturgess’s approach has the weakness of equating narrativity with meaningful resultative coherence, claiming that indeed every narrative, however different, is the “autocoherent” expression of an authorial intention. A theory of narrativity that is based on such a general ascription of coherence and meaning tends to conceal the processual dimension of narrative coherence and, on a more general level, does not lend itself to the analysis of neither the specificity of a particular narrative nor the differences between various narratives. Herman (2013b, 257–262), for his part, draws (very shortly) on The Metamorphosis, examining primarily the way in which the novel blends animal with human experientiality. Drawing on theories about the “distributed and extended nature of mind” (2013b, 260) and on the evolutionary utility of narratives, Herman claims that Kafka’s narrative “suggest[s] how intelligent behaviour can be distributed across nonhuman as well as human agents in broader environments for acting and interacting”; it thereby serves the goal of “enlarg[ing] the society of mind ontologically” (2013b, 261). Herman compares The Metamorphosis with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass in order to illustrate the diversity of “styles, purposes, and effects of narrative worldmaking” susceptible of realising such “mindextending” features. He underlines the commonality between these two and other narratives in terms of typical narrative textual strategies and functions: [. . .] both The Golden Ass and The Metamorphosis exploit the strategies for chunking experience, for imputing causal relations between events, for managing typification problems, for pursuing lines of communicative and other conduct, and for distributing intelligent activity that stories of all sorts afford. (Herman 2013b, 262)

Herman’s analysis serves obviously primarily the goal of proving the pertinence of his study of “the mind-enabling and mind-extending features of stories” (2013b, 262). The weakness of Herman’s approach lies again in the incapacity of describing the singularity of Kafka’s narrativity. Of course, it may be correct that all narratives seek to enhance somehow distributed societal cognition and that an added value of The Metamorphosis is the fictional extension of our human cognition to animal forms of perception and experientiality. But the distinctive features of Kafka’s narrativity, the ways in which it induces a “Kafkaesque” impression in readers, remain unexplored, also due to the fact that Herman refers only to a single, specific aspect of Kafka’s novel (namely the

33 This seems probable insofar as Sturgess assumes “that the role of the reader in detecting a narrative’s logic of narrativity is crucial” (1992, 53).

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dimension of animality), leaving aside the insights gained by the community of Kafka scholars. Richardson’s (2015) few remarks on Kafka are opposed to those of Herman insofar as he does not seek to ‘naturalise’ Kafka’s novels, but presents them as deviant, “unnatural narratives”34: Most of Kafka’s work can be situated within the boundaries of the unnatural but at different points on the spectrum. Some texts, like “The Judgment,” might ultimately be essentially mimetic, while others, like “A Country Doctor,” are pretty thoroughly oneiric and follow the conventions of representations of dreams. Most of the rest of his work, however, easily exceeds the mimetic and eludes nonmimetic35 conventions and thus can be considered unnatural. (Richardson 2015, 15)

In view of the effects that Kafka’s narratives provoke in readers (from interpretative difficulties to the impression of an unconventional, specific “Kafkaesque” quality), I agree that Kafka’s prose can be considered as an example of narrative “unnaturalness”, at least in the sense of an intentional “transgression of conventional mimetic or nonmimetic conventions” (Richardson 2015, 5).36 The heading of unnaturalness, however, covers a broad range of phenomena – indeed all possible ways by which narratives reject contemporary narrative conventions as well as norms of representation. The categorisation of Kafka’s narratives as “unnatural” represents thus rather an occasion or a starting point for an exact analysis of Kafka’s narrativity, but is not at all suited to pinning down precisely the ways in which the novel challenges readers and mimetic narrative conventions. Also the alleged “oneiric” quality of Kafka’s narratives is a commonplace or key word rather than an analysis of how Kafka’s narratives are constructed. An interesting narratological approach to Kafka, this time to the short story “Vor dem Gesetz”, has been presented by Emma Kafalenos (1995). Kafalenos grounds her concept of narrative in Propp’s and Todorov’s “narrative sequence”, arguing that there is an ordered set of eleven “functions”,37 which lead any narrative

34 See my summary of Richardson’s notion of “unnatural narratives” in sections 2.3.2, 2.3.6 and 2.5.2. 35 Richardson makes a clear distinction between the antimimetic and the nonmimetic: “an antimimetic (or antirealist) work [. . .] defies the conventions of mimetic (or realist) representation [. . .] while a nonmimetic (nonrealist) work, such as a fairy tale, employs a consistent, parallel storyworld and follows established conventions, or in some cases, merely adds supernatural component to its otherwise mimetic depiction of the actual world” (2015, 4). 36 As I have argued earlier (see section 2.5.2), Richardson’s conception of the antimimetic mingles together two dimensions: anti-representationalism and anticonventionalism. 37 Kafalenos defines “the term function as an interpreted event, an event interpreted according to its consequences” (1995, 119).

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sequence from an initial equilibrium via a disequilibrium to a new equilibrium.38 According to her analysis, the sjuzhet of Kafka’s story “traces only a small portion of a complete narrative sequence” (126). Insofar as readers know nothing about what has happened before the man arrived at the site of the Law, they quickly realise that the initial equilibrium as well as the first constitutive functions of a narrative sequence (a “motivating disruptive event”, the man’s decision to “attempt to alleviate” this disruptive event “by addressing the Law” and the fact that he “sets out on his journey to the site of the Law”) have been skipped by narrative discourse; nonetheless, these elements of the narrative sequence partake as unrealised functions in the reader’s interpretative cognitive model of the fabula.39 The first function described by the sjuzhet (function “G”) is the man’s arrival at the site of the Law, understood as the condition for his “primary action”, which should lead to a new equilibrium. As Kafalenos argues, the process of reading Kafka’s story leads successively to several “reinterpretations”40 of the fabula, i.e. to the creation of several new hypotheses about the function that the man’s presence and actions at the site of the Law represents: “Kafka’s protagonist interprets and reinterprets his situation, and readers adjust their interpretations in response to the man’s shifting interpretations” (1995, 128). Kafalenos comes to the conclusion that this reinterpretation “dramatizes an epistemological doubt” (132), characteristic of Modernist narrative.41

38 Kafalenos offers the following list: “Inital equilibrium [not a function] [comment by Kafalenos, ESW] [/] A (or a) disruptive event (or reevaluation of a situation) [/] B request that someone alleviate A (or a) [/] C decision by C-actant to alleviate A (or a) [/] C’ C-actant’s initial act to alleviate A (or a) [/] D C-actant is tested [/] E C-actant responds to test [/] E C-actant acquires empowerment [/] G C-actant arrives at the place, or time, for H [/] H C-actant’s primary action to alleviate A (or a) [I] (or Ineg) success (or failure) of H [/] K equilibrium” (1995, 119–120). According to Kafalenos, the functions B, D, E, F and G do not partake in the “minimal complete sequence” (120). 39 “[W]e construct a prior sequence according to which some previous discruptive event (function A) has motivated the man from the country (C-actant) to decide (function C’) to travel to the site of the Law, where he has now arrived” (Kafalenos 1995, 127). 40 See also section 5.4.10. 41 Kafalenos (1995, 131) also argues that Kafka’s sjuzhet is reduced to two functions (D and E) insofar as the ending of the story produces a series of “negative functions” (the man does not reach the site of the Law, does not address the Law and does not alleviate the untold “motivating disrupting event”). These functions are the doorkeeper’s testing of the man and the man’s waiting. As Kafalenos argues, the sequence is nonetheless complete insofar as the man’s death reinstates a new equilibrium (see 133).

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5.2.3 Narratological Kafka studies: The question of perspective I would like to turn now to the second group of researchers outlined above, that is, to scholars who focus on Kafka and decide to conduct an analyticalnarratological approach. As far as I see, their discourse is centred mainly42 on the question of perspective. Friedrich Beißner’s hypothesis inaugurated the discourse on perspective. According to it, Kafka’s narratives have the “old epic virtue” (1952, 16) of “Einsinnigkeit”, that is, of presenting the diegetic world exclusively from the point of view of the protagonist. According to this hypothesis, everything that is being narrated is being seen or experienced by the protagonist; nothing is being narrated without, against or in the absence of him (see Beißner 1952, 28). The protagonist is the one and only experiential source of the narration. Insofar as this Einsinnigkeit does not leave any distance between the narrator and the protagonist, the narrating instance merges, despite the form of the third-person narration, with the character. Since this character-narrator unity experiences jointly the diegetic happenings and developments, the temporal distance between intra- and extradiegetic time, which traditionally arises with the narrator’s retro-perspective (time of the telling versus time of the told), melts away.43 In other words, the perspective of the character and his way of progressing in time dominates the whole narrative process. According to Beißner, this narratorial mode affects the reader as well; s/he feels like being caught in the perspective of the protagonist, even like becoming one with K.44

42 Narratological analyses of Kafka’s novels have addressed a broad range of phenomena. There are, for instance, stylistic phenomena that have been the object of narratological analyses, such as the use of narrated monologue in Das Schloss (see, e.g., Cohn 1968, 32–33). The attempt of providing an exhaustive overview on the whole field of narratological research on Kafka would, however, go by far beyond the confines of this chapter. I am therefore concentrating, in this subchapter, on the aspect that has gained most narratological attention (namely the question of perspective). Further approaches, which are important in narratological regards, will be discussed throughout the whole chapter. 43 “Der Abstand zwischen dem Geschehen und dem Erzählen ist aufgehoben” (Beißner 1952, 34). Cohn points to the virtual present of the narration as well: “the past situation loses its pastness and becomes a virtual present within the text” (1968, 31). As Cohn points out, the use of the adverb heute [today] is “conclusive proof that the past moment is the center of temporal orientation, the zeropoint of time within the novel” (32). 44 “Es gibt nur den sich selbst (paradox praeterial) erzählenden Vorgang: daher beim Lesen das Gefühl der Unausweichlichkeit, der magischen Fesselung an das alles ausfüllende, scheinbar absurde Geschehen, daher die oft bezeugte Wirkung des Beklemmenden. Kafka verwandelt [. . .] nicht nur sich, sondern auch den Leser in die Hauptgestalt” (Beißner 1952, 35–36).

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Walser, a student Beißner’s, presents his approach (1992 [1961]) as his PhD thesis. His connection to Beißner is evident in various respects. Not only does Beißner’s concept of Einsinnigkeit comply well with Walser’s idea of a “congruence” between “the author” and K. (the latter serving as the author’s “medium”) due to the “disappearance” of the narrator behind K.45; also his exploration of the “epic” quality of Kafka’s narratives has its source in Beißner’s approach (see Walser 1992, 104–109) insofar as Beißner describes Kafka’s Einsinnigkeit as an “old-epic virtue” (Beißner 1952, 16, transl. mine). Moreover, the two scholars use the same argument structure. They start their analyses by presenting their conceptions of what brings about the literary value of narratives and then use these conceptions as a means to legitimate their formalist proceeding. Beißner praises the formal feature of Einsinnigkeit, contrasting it with the flaw of “unbelievable omniscience” (“unglaubhafte Allwissenheit”, 1952, 19). He thereby validates his formalist analysis of Kafka’s Einsinnigkeit, deducing the value of his formalistanalytical approach from the alleged value of the literature under consideration. Walser, for his part, links the value of a literary work of art to an alleged “totality”, understood as the text’s independence from outer-textual, biographical facts, and then attempts to prove, through formal analysis, that Kafka’s narratives are reigned by such an (“epic”) totality. Both Beißner and Walser thus legitimise their proceeding as a means of laying Kafka’s literary value bare.46 What Schuster (2012, 90) presents, in his research review, as a qualitatively new hypothesis of Walser – namely the lack of a gap between the time of the telling and the time of the told – can already be found in nuce in Beißner’s argument (1952, 32–34).47 Walser’s excellent study presents nonetheless a variety of further, truly new insights, which do not cease being (deliberately or unwittingly) repeated by scholars until today, such as his brilliant analysis of the repeated process of mutual annulation (“Aufhebung”) of the orders of the K.s and of their counter-institutions (the court, the castle), his considerations on the functionality of the characters encountered by the protagonists and his analysis of Kafka’s groups of actants (which replace, in a way, individual characters).

45 Walser speaks about “the narration without a manifest narrator” (“das Erzählen ohne den erscheinenden Erzähler”, 1992, 18). 46 We find here a further example for the connection between questions of literariness and narrativity for which I have argued in chapter 3. 47 “Der Erzähler – das ist das Geheimnis der Wirkung – ist nirgends dem Erzählten voraus, auch wenn er im Praeteritum erzählt” (Beißner 1952, 32).

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As Busse (2001, 12–21) and Schuster (2012, 89–105)48 have shown in their research reviews, Beißner’s analysis has created a discourse that has subsequently divided Kafka scholars into two groups: those who share Beißner’s basic idea of a narrative Einsinnigkeit (such as Martin Walser, Lothar Fietz, Ingeborg Henel, Fritz Martini and Jürgen Kobs) and those who constrain or reject the validity of Beißner’s hypthesis (inter alia Klaus-Peter Philippi, Dietrich Krusche, Keit Leopold, Winfried Kudszus, Walter Sokel, Dorrit Cohn, Hans Zeller and Waldemar Fromm). The main object of debate in this context is the question whether the narrator is entirely confined to the perspective of K., i.e. to his perceptions and thoughts, or whether the text provides, at least punctually, evidence for a proper narratorial perspective. In other words, the question is to know whether the narrator himself must be considered as the perspectival origin of certain utterances. Although some researchers still contend that the narrator coincides with K. (see e.g. Müller 2008, 523) or that readers “experience the world of the novel only through the sensory organs of K.” (Busse 2001, 10), the majority of scholars (into which I would include myself) agree today that there are passages in which a proper narratorial perspective manifests itself. Schuster (2012) provides a valuable overview on such passages in which the narrator . . . a) . . . observes K. from outside (e.g. the episode with Bürgel; see Zeller 1986, 280),49 b) . . . speculates about K. (see Schuster 2012, 96, 171),50

48 I do not agree with Schuster’s research review in this point. Schuster (2012, 91–92) suggests that Beißner’s thesis is narrowed down by Beißner’s adherents in a way that emphasises increasingly the consciousness of the protagonist. This development culminates, according to Schuster, in Henel’s (1967) hypothesis according to which the diegetic world of Das Schloss has no objective existence, but is the projection of the protagonist. Henel would thus draw the consequence of Kobs’s approach. It should be noted, however, that Henel bases her approach primarily on Walser. Moreover, her interpretation widens the scope of earlier (especially Walser’s) studies inasmuch as she searches for a hermeneutic explanation for Walser’s analysis of Kafka’s poetic-narrative system. Walser has convincingly shown that the castle neutralises K.’s actions, pushing him continuously back to his starting position. Henel, for her part, asks hermeneutically for the purpose behind this poetic construction, for the reason behind the vainness of each of K.’s actions. She emphasises the fact that the castle does not act out of itself, but only reacts to K.’s culpable actions and lies. The castle’s resistance thus seems to cohere somehow with K.’s psyche, counterbalancing his culpability. It is this train of thought that leads her to her final hypothesis according to which the castle might be K.’s projection. 49 Busse (2001, 221–230), however, argues that the Bürgel episode narrates the unconscious perception of K. 50 The narrator speculates for example in the following sentences: “K. blieb wie bisher, drehte sich nicht einmal um, schien gar nicht neugierig, sah vor sich hin” (S, 11); “Wieder stand K. still,

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c) . . . summarises a series of events (see Schuster 2012, 96),51 d) . . . makes use of psychonarration (see Schuster 2012, 96; Zeller 1986, 279)52 or e) . . . alludes to knowledge that K. cannot have at that moment (see Schuster 2012, 100, 171–172, 174, 188)53 Zeller (1986, 280) argues that the narrative mode oscillates between two extremes: the narrator either yields the perspective completely to K. or adopts his own perspective (or even the perspective of another character). Schuster’s (2012, 182, 188) argument goes in a similar direction insofar as he emphasises the “flexibility” of the narrative mode as well. But in addition to that, he argues that the perspectives of the narrator and K. are sometimes superimposed in one and the same passage (see Schuster 2012, 181–191). This superimposition of perspectives contributes to the perspectival “ambiguity” (166) of the novel, l which, as Schuster argues, is already inherent in the original first-person version of Das Schloss. Sentences that stem from the initial, first-person version of the novel (such as “Wieder stand ich K. still, als hätte ich im Stillstehn mehr Kraft des Urteils”, quoted in Schuster 2012, 171) present a first-person narrator who speculates on his younger self as if he were a stranger, thereby infringing the laws of first-person narration (see Schuster 2012, 172). Cohn has described such sentences, where K. “presents himself as a mysterious individual”, as perspectival withdrawal: “the perspective suddenly withdraws from an inside to an outside view, from inner discourse to impersonal account” (1968, 35, translation mine). The sentence quoted above is indeed a very interesting example, since the conjectural expression (“als hätte ich”) does not insinuate here, as in other examples, an intentional deceit from the part of K., directed towards intradiegetic interlocutors,54 but only a lack of self-understanding. As an effect,

als hätte er im Stillstehn mehr Kraft des Urteils” (S, 18); “offenbar infolge seiner Müdigkeit zögerte er die Straße zu verlassen” (S, 21) (emphases mine). 51 “Oft sah K. von seinem Bett aus dem Treiben der Drei in völliger Gleichgültigkeit zu” (S, 74). 52 “Den einer solchen Behörde gegenüber wahnwitzigen Gedanken, daß hier Unentschlossenheit mitgewirkt habe, streifte K. kaum” (S, 41–42). 53 “Hinter der Dorfkirche [. . .] war die Schule. Ein niedriges langes Gebäude [. . .] lag es hinter einem umgitterten Garten, der jetzt ein Schneefeld war” (S, 18–19, emphasis mine). 54 As Cohn has convincingly argued, “conjectural phrases tend to change meaning with the shift in grammatical person” (1968, 36–37). In the first-person version, the expressions have to be attributed to the first-person narrator, suggesting that K. tries to deceive other characters present in the respective situation; in the third-person version, the expressions can be read either as conjectures of the other characters observing K. or as conjecture of a third-person narrator who lacks knowledge about K.’s mental states.

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K. is already characterised by mysteriousness and by a lack of inner coherence in the first-person version of Das Schloss (the so-called Urschloss); these characteristics are then maintained in the third-person narration.55 Schuster proposes to distinguish between two kinds of perspectival oscillation, which are independent from each other. On the one hand, it is the perspectival origin that oscillates between K. and the narrator; on the other hand, it is the (knowledge-related) “range” of perspective that oscillates between complete access to the protagonist’s inner life, including the exact rendering of K.’s thoughts, and mere speculations on the reasons for K.’s behaviour (see Schuster 2012, 177–181, 184).56 Two further hypotheses from Schuster’s analysis should be emphasised. Firstly, Schuster argues that K. is an unreliable narrator (2012, 203–221).57 Whenever K. usurps the narratorial position, he offers a highly distorted representation of intradiegetic reality. These distortions reveal not only K.’s combative attitude towards the castle, but also his strategic mind. At various points, K. employs strategies of self-defence and of self-aggrandisement; he obscures, conceals and twists facts. In this context, Schuster (2012, 214) comes to the quite convincing conclusion that the figural narration of K. has an intrinsically dialogic shape. If the way in which K. presents certain events or actions is designed to avert reproaches, or to cast him in a better (more innocent) light, K. must have in mind an interlocutor – or a reader? – who is supposed to scrutinise his narration and to heap reproaches on him. Secondly, Schuster (2012, 185) claims that K. and other characters, such as the teacher, are somehow able to hear the voice of the narrator. Considering the passage where K. meets the teacher for the first time, Schuster argues that K. must have heard the information given by the narrator (according to which the teacher has an imperious character), because K. salutes him, as Schuster (2012, 185) argues, in “preemptive obedience” and is surprised by the teacher’s sweet temper. In my eyes, this claim is hardly convincing because its starts 55 As Cohn (1968, 28–30) points out, Kafka’s change from first-person to third-person narration has been effectuated quickly and simply by the replacement of the personal pronouns. 56 “Der Erzähler schwankt zwischen einer umfassenden, fast allwissenden Übersicht und Einsicht und einer Beschränktheit, die den Rückgriff auf Spekulationen notwendig macht” (Schuster 2012, 181). While Schuster’s analysis is, all in all, convincing, the allegedly new categories of perspective introduced by Schuster’s analysis have been introduced into the theory of viewpoint already some decades ago, by Uspensky’s (1973): his compositional theory of perspective distinguishes inter alia between the spatio-temporal and the psychological plane of viewpoint. These categories are susceptible of covering the two kinds of oscillation described by Schuster. 57 See also his analysis of Olga’s unreliability (Schuster 2012, 221–230).

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from a premise according to which it is the narrator who initially holds the floor. This premise, however, is questionable. Schuster fails to acknowledge that it is probably K. “who sees” (i.e. who is the focaliser) in this passage. To be more precise: Schuster argues that the narration provides some information that the protagonist K. cannot have. Neither can K. know that the teacher has looked at him already from afar nor that he was the only person in the surroundings. According to Schuster, this information must thus stem from the narrator. I would argue, by contrast, that this information is neither necessarily “true” nor necessarily focalised through the narrator. It is very well possible that K. focalises the reality exactly as he experiences it, including distorting impressions and momentary fantasies. That the teacher has already “targeted” him from a distance (“Der Lehrer [. . .] hatte K. schon von der Ferne ins Auge gefasst”, S, 19), for example, complies well with K.’s general thinking of the castle in terms of attack and defence. The description of the teacher as an “imperious little man” (“einen so befehlshaberischen kleinen Mann”, S, 19) also seems to be a spontaneous interpretative impression of K. rather than neutral information given by a better-informed narrator. Thus, while Schuster shows convincingly how K. distorts reality in other scenes, he sometimes takes narratorial utterances erroneously for reliable and fails to recognise that we are in fact dealing with what Busse (2001, 52) calls “the perspectival grasp on reality” of the protagonist. Busse (2001)58 emphasises the fact that K. constructs reality not only by perceiving it, but also by interpreting the linguistic utterances of other characters, who, for their part, convey various perspectives onto (and interpretations of) reality. As a result, the reality of Das Schloss lives by a clash of perspectives59 that is narratologically enabled by the large amount of direct

58 Busse (2001) judges the models of Stanzel and Genette as inadequate for an analysis of Das Schloss. She thus decides to base her concept of perspective on that developed by Nietzsche, understanding it as “the standpoint of the perceiving subject” (“Standpunkt des wahrnehmenden Subjekts”, 2001, 52). She understands the notion of perspective such that the subject constitutes its own reality through its perception. For Busse, the notion of perspective is intimately connected to the idea of interpretation, since, as a processual and evaluative activity, interpretation is a subjective, perspectively restricted access to reality as well. There are significant overlaps between Busse’s and Schuster’s approach regarding the connection between perspective and perception. See, e.g., Schuster’s analysis of “perception as the product of perspective” (2012, 240–246) as well as his analysis of the unreliable, distorted perception of K. (246–264), of Gardena (264–268) and Pepi (268–279). 59 Schuster (2012, 101) comes to a similar conclusion, describing Das Schloss as a multidimensional textual web in which various perspectives refer to each other without providing a confirmation or refutation of any one of them. According to Schuster, the technique of perspectival

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speech60 (see Busse 2001, 182). Inasmuch as the narration itself represents reality from K.’s point of view, which is challenged by the other characters, the narration does not provide any fixed point from which an objective, correct interpretation of reality could be undertaken. Busse therefore argues that the narration itself should be understood as an interpretative process.61 If one compares Schuster’s (2012) and Busse’s (2001) approaches, it is evident that Schuster’s work builds in many points on the groundwork laid by Busse’s (2001) work,62 although he draws only very sparingly explicitly on her work. Their focuses of research are, however, quite different. While Busse aims to enrich narratological analyses of Kafka by introducing a new, “more extensive concept of perspective” (11), based on Nietzsche’s philosophy, Schuster’s narratological study of viewpoint partakes in the larger project of analysing Kafka’s handwritten manuscript. Busse’s formal analysis of perspective is by far not as exact and convincing as that presented a decade later by Schuster (2012). Moreover, the insights that she gains through her content-related analysis of perspective are not completely new; they can be positioned within a field of research that analyses the relationship between Das Schloss and language scepticism (see, e.g., Alt 1985; Kessler 1983; Schenk 2005; Thorlby 1987), communication (see, e.g., Kellerwessel 1991; Neumann 1990), interpretation (see, e.g., Schenk 2005) or the “negativity of recognition” (“Negativität der Erkenntnis”, see Kienlechner 1981). Busse’s decision to work with a new, more extensive concept of perspective, however, is very valuable insofar as it represents the missing link between proper narratological and more hermeneutic approaches to Kafka. Her study lays bare the interdependence that exists between the formal feature of

change creates a multidimensionality, which contrasts with unilinear truth, uniqueness and clarity. I will come back to this problem in section 5.4.10. 60 See section 5.4.10. 61 “Die Figuren stehen in einem auslegenden Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit. Der Erzähler bringt dieses Verhältnis mit einer besonderen Erzählweise zum Vorschein. Er bietet keinen festen Punkt an, an welchem sich die Lesenden Gewißheit verschaffen könnten, welche der Deutungen ‘richtig’ oder ‘falsch’ ist. Die Wirklichkeit wird also selbst nur als eine Deutung des Erzählers vermittelt, die wiederum von den Lesenden gedeutet werden muß. [. . .] Das Erzählen selbst vollzieht sich als ein deutendes Verfahren” (Busse 2001, 187). As a conclusion, Busse anchors the artistic value of the novel in the condensed presentation of “all three levels of narration” within “one form and one story: K.’s relationship to the castle, the relation of the narrator to the character and the relation of the author to the written. All three levels are characterised by perspectival grasp. Successive action, process of narration and the process of writing are condensed in the narrated work” (Busse 2001, 253, translation mine). 62 See especially Schuster’s (2012, section 1.4) research review and his analysis of the “unreliability of perception in Das Schloss” (2012, section 2.4).

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perspective and the contents of the novel, thereby leading the narratological branch of Kafka scholars out of the isolation in which they have been caught due to their narrow, formalist focus.

5.3 Kafka: An “antinarrative” novelist? A strange kind of emplotment One thing becomes apparent when overviewing the narratological approaches considered thus far: almost all of them – except Richardson (2015) – ignore the fact that Kafka’s novels challenge established notions of narrativity. One of the most astonishing features of Kafka’s narratives is the fact that they do not comply with fundamental narrative conventions, considered central to narrativity. Ironically, it is exactly this fact that represents many narratologists’ blind spot. The reason for this ignorance lies perhaps in the narratological approaches themselves. The first group of researchers considered above uses Kafka only in order to exemplify their own theories. Insofar as these theories are narratological in nature, doubts about Kafka’s narrativity apparently do not cross their minds. The second group of researchers considered above is interested primarily in questions of categorisation. Since the super-category under consideration (perspective, focalisation) is at the very heart of narratological preoccupations, researchers fail to notice the ways in which Kafka’s narratives challenge narrativity, that is, those narrative dimensions that provide the object of narratological research (i.e. narratives) with its defining qualities. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that scholars with a less restricted focus, whose efforts are completely directed towards pinning down Kafka’s particularity, do recognise and analyse the ways in which Kafka’s novels challenge narrative standards. As far as I see, most of these analyses discuss Kafka’s deviations from norms of emplotment. These deviations will be discussed in the following eight subchapters.

5.3.1 The difficulty of a summary The particularity of Kafka’s emplotment already becomes visible in the difficulty, noticed for example by Engel (2013, 180), of giving a summary of the novel. I would argue that this difficulty relies upon the fact that a summary requires the existence of narrative coherence. Kafka’s fragment, however, is so full of ambiguities and incoherences that a summary cannot be given without an interpretative effort.

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To illustrate my claim, I would like to take a short look at Engel’s (2013, 181) summary, which structures the novel into two main lines of action: (i) the persistent effort of K., the protagonist, to travel from the village into the castle – which is even topologically impossible in the fictional world63 – and (ii) K.’s love affair with Frieda, which Engel considers to represent for K. an alternative to his striving for the castle (insofar as she competes with the castle as a prospect of fulfilment). There is no doubt that these two points represent vital action elements of the novel. But the devil is in the details. Is it really a stable, continuous goal of K. to enter the castle? Or does this goal become gradually replaced by more proximate targets? Does K. not shift his attention to “intermediary instances” (“Zwischeninstanzen”),64 as Witte (2009, 51–52) observes, just like the protagonist of the so-called Türhüterlegende? And does K. pursue this goal from the very beginning of the story or is it rather triggered by the ways in which the villagers depict (that is, auratise,65 sacralise and/or transcendentalise) the castle and especially Klamm66 (namely as somebody who is unreachable)?67 Does K. actually seek to reach the castle or does he primarily seek to battle or compete with the castle, as Müller (2008) suggests? Concerning K.’s love affair with Frieda, many scholars have underlined that K. instrumentalises Frieda as a way to enter the castle. If so, one can doubt the hypothesis according to which Frieda competes with the castle as a prospect of fulfilment, considering her rather as subsidiary to K.’s goal of getting in touch with the castle. Frieda even mentions this problem shortly before she separates from K.; it does thus not seem as if K. has acknowledged the potential of happiness that readers might see in Frieda. Engel (2013, 180) explains the difficulty of summarising The Castle by three facts: (i) the fragmentary nature of the novel, (ii) the lack of a proper action in the sense of a teleological succession of events68 and (iii) “the odd kind of

63 See Wagner (2011) and Vogl (2014). 64 One might think here of Klamm, who is but one of the minor officials of the castle, or of the mother of Hans (who is a lady from the castle). While K. initially tries to get into the castle, which is a topological goal, he seems to aim subsequently at the occasion to talk to somebody of the castle – a goal that aims at a social activity. 65 For an exploration of the feudal-auratic characteristics of the castle, see Engel (2013). 66 Gardena, for instance, has kept three objects associated with Klamm like relics for twenty years: “Das Bild, das Tuch und das Häubchen, das sind die drei Andenken, die ich an ihn habe” (S, 126). 67 To give just one example: “‘[. . .] Wie kannst Du nur glauben, daß Klamm mit Dir reden wird!’ ‘Und mit Dir würde er reden?’ fragte K. ‘Auch nicht,’ sagte Frieda, ‘nicht mit Dir, nicht mit mir, es sind bare Unmöglichkeiten.’” (S, 78). 68 For Engel, one cannot find an “eigentliche Handlung als einen zielgerichteten Ablauf von Ereignissen” (Engel 2013, 180).

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narration of the novel” (“die eigentümliche Erzählweise des Romans”, 180), which he considers to be due to the “double unreliability” of K.: on the one hand, K., the clueless stranger, goes wrong in his assumptions about the village and castle69; on the other hand, he is intentionally telling half-truths and lies.70 Engel’s second (ii) point lays bare a crucial problem of Kafka’s narrativity. Narrativity is mostly considered to be defined by some kind of goal-directed action – by an eventfulness that comes up through a change of state, which is the result of the goal-driven actions of one or more characters.71 If Kafka’s novel defies such norms of teleological eventfulness, its narrative status becomes somehow questionable.

5.3.2 Eventfulness What the novel depicts as the central event toward which the whole action is directed – K.’s entrance into the realm of the castle – obviously never takes place. Postponed to an unreachable, virtual future, the central event transforms all the encounters and dialogues, which form the actual plot, into subsidiary, secondary, stopgap events, which therefore (paradoxically) lack eventfulness. Allemann describes this lack of eventfulness or tellability as follows: Wenn der geneigte Leser eines Romans von der Lektüre erwartet, daß etwas geschieht und daß dieses Etwas von einiger Bedeutung sei, so muß er sich von dieser Erwartung bei der Lektüre von Kafkas letztem Roman ziemlich vollständig befreien, es sei denn, er wolle das Entscheidende des Geschehens darin erblicken, daß nichts wirklich Entscheidendes (Allemann 1998, 198–199) geschieht.72

Many theorists, however, argue that narrativity lives by eventfulness. Prince, for instance, claims that narrative traditionally “favors inversion” with regard to the state of the protagonist: “inside to outside, happiness to unhappiness,

69 This aspect has also been underlined by Kellerwessel (1991). Adopting a linguisticphilosophic perspective, he argues that K. lacks the social competence to follow the rules of the village and the castle because he incorporates a substantially other modus vivendi, following respectively completely different rules of communication. 70 The way in which K. enmeshes himself in contradictions and lies has been emphasised e.g. by Campbell (1986). 71 See chapter 2. 72 “If a person so inclined to read a novel expects something to happen and that this something is somehow meaningful, then this reader has to free himself or herself from this expectation almost completely during the reading of Kafka’s last novel unless he or she decides to find the meaning of the plot in the fact that nothing important happens” (translation mine).

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poverty to wealth, ignorance to learning, and so on and so forth” (1982, 154). In a similar manner, Schmid argues that The minimal condition of narrativity is that at least one change of state must be represented. The single change of state that constitutes narrativity implies at least the following: (1) a temporal structure with at least two states, the initial situation and the final situation; and (2) the equivalence of the initial and final situations, that is, the presence of a similarity and a contrast between the states, or, more precisely, the presence of a similarity and difference of the properties of those states. (Schmid 2003, 19)

Obviously, the central change of state that is at stake in Das Schloss is the protagonist’s passing from a state where he is outside of the castle to a state where he is inside (or in direct contact with) the castle. Do we have to assume that The Castle is not eventful and that it thus lacks narrativity, given that this change of state does not take place? Is it, as Prince’s approach would suggest, a “pointless”, uninteresting, low-quality narrative or even an “antinarrative”? Heselhaus (1952, 367) argues indeed that Kafka writes “anti-novels”. But this term does not serve to deny the narrative quality of Kafka’s novels. Instead, it refers to the fact that Kafka’s novels distinguish themselves from earlier novelistic forms. For Heselhaus, Kafka’s anti-novels are characterised precisely by three macro-structural dimensions: (i) the initial exposure of “the marvellously inexplicable”,73 which transforms the world and shakes it to its very foundations, (ii) the hero’s incapacity and unwillingness to integrate into the new world order, understood as the driving force of the plot,74 and (iii) the persistent presence of “irreal images” (in Das Schloss: images of the castle), which somehow govern the whole action; these images both haunt the desperate protagonist and withdraw from him (see Heselhaus 1952, 369). Interestingly, the particle “anti-” does thus not denote, in Heselhaus’s account, the negation or absence of narrativity, but a specific kind of narrativity, which turns against (or deviates from) established novelistic norms (which Heselhaus somehow presumes, but which he unfortunately does not make explicit). Heselhaus’s argument underlines therefore what Richardson calls Kafka’s “unnaturalness”. Eventfulness, as one of the present-day norms of narrativity, can however be understood differently, depending on the respective theory. For Lotman

73 “Am Anfang jedes Kafkaschen Romans steht das Wunderbar-Unerklärliche, das die bisherige Welt von Grund auf verwandelt und aufreißt” (Heselhaus 1952, 367). 74 “Der Roman entwickelt sich dann jedesmal daraus, daß sich der Held wie im Antimärchen nicht in den Weltzusammenhang hereinfinden kann und will” (Heselhaus 1952, 368).

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(1977), for instance, the transgression of a topological-semantic boundary is the central event of an emplotted narrative.75

5.3.3 A “plotless” narrative? It is indeed a narrative “transgression”, in Lotman’s sense, which is K.’s goal. He wants to get to the castle or, in other words, transgress the boundary that separates the village from the castle. Since K. never succeeds in doing so, it seems, at first glance, as if the novel is, according to Lotman’s (1977) terminology, a text “without plot”. But one should perhaps not jump to conclusions hastily. First of all, it should be noted that Lotman assumes that texts present two disjunctive, somehow opposed subspaces. Already this basic assumption cannot be easily applied to the novel since, as many scholars have emphasised, the opposition between village and castle is unstable from the very beginning since the text both constructs and deconstructs the castle’s otherness.76 Moreover, K. seems to belong neither to the one nor to the other space, i.e. neither to the village (where he is and stays – as Gardena declares uncomplimentary – “a stranger”) nor to the castle.77 Instead, K. seems to belong to the space that separates the two spaces, i.e. to the very space of the boundary.78 Indeed, the idea of a proper clear-cut boundary is repeatedly deconstructed by Kafka. For example, as Olga describes Barnabas’s contact with the castle, she emphasises that, although there are “barriers”, K. “mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing-line” (CA-M, 175).79 75 For a summary of Lotman’s approach, see chapter 3. I have elaborated elsewhere in greater detail on the applicability of Lotman’s theory to Das Schloss (see Wagner 2011). 76 See section 5.4.7. 77 “Sie sind nicht aus dem Schloß, Sie sind nicht aus dem Dorfe, Sie sind nichts. Leider aber sind Sie doch etwas, ein Fremder, einer der überzählig und überall im Weg ist [. . .]” (S, 80). 78 “Ce que Kafka met en scène ici, c’est un mouvement spatial qui subvertit la structure événementielle de Lotman. La transgression de la frontière devient une promenade sur la frontière; chemin et frontière forment une seule ligne. Voilà pourquoi K. reste pour toujours l’étranger: étant frontalier, il n’appartient ni à l’espace du village ni à l’espace du château. [. . .]. Peut-être n’est-ce donc pas un hasard si K., lors de son arrivée au village, reste debout précisément sur un pont, lieu par excellence de l’entre-deux” (Wagner 2011, 4). 79 “Er [Barnabas, ESW] kommt in Kanzleien, aber es ist doch nur ein Teil aller, dann sind Barrièren und hinter ihnen sind noch andere Kanzleien [. . .] Diese Barrieren darfst Du Dir auch nicht als eine bestimmte Grenze vorstellen [. . .] Barrieren sind auch in den Kanzleien, in die er geht, es gibt also auch Barrieren, die er passiert und sie sehn nicht anders aus, als die, über die er noch nicht hinweggekommen ist und es ist auch deshalb nicht von vornherein anzunehmen, daß sich hinter diesen letzteren Barrieren wesentlich andere Kanzleien befinden als jene, in denen Barnabas schon war” (S, 275).

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The novel thus seems to be neither emplotted nor plotless, in Lotman’s sense, but subverts the norms that enable and unleash the dynamics of emplotment. The novel presents readers not only with an unstable, ambiguous topology, including a boundary that lacks the features of a boundary, but also with a protagonist who defies the alternative, presented by Lotman, between mobile characters (i.e. of characters who can cross the border) and characters who are confined to stay in their home space.

5.3.4 Syntagmatic “flatness”: Teleology, iteration and episodic linearity Another feature of narrative emplotment, however, seems to be respected by Kafka, namely the teleological dimension of the plot. While Engel (2013) argues that the novel lacks proper action in the sense of a teleological succession of events (see above), one could ask: Are not all events governed by K.’s persistent effort to get in touch with (people from) the castle? If so, then K.’s determination to get in touch with the castle is the central teleological component, which directly or indirectly drives all events. Is it not K.’s unabated willingness to get in touch with the castle that provides the action with its specific “suspense”,80 that is, with a prospective, teleological kind of curiosity? While Allemann (1998, 208) also speaks about suspense in this context (see below), Walser (1992, 117) denies Kafka’s prose any suspense, suggesting even that it is “boring”.81 Walser explains this effect by the novels’ “epic” (rather than novelistic) constitution. While novels do traditionally narrate the protagonist’s development, Kafka’s narratives – and especially The Castle – follow, express or illustrate from their very beginning one and the same poetological principle, thereby disabling narrative progress. According to Walser, Kafka’s novels depict – much like an epos – a “totality”, which does not result from the developing action, but which governs ab ovo each and every detail. Walser argues that this totality consists of the mutual elimination (or nivelling) of the two world orders of K. and the castle. More precisely, K. interferes with the world order of the castle and the castle reacts by abolishing K.’s self-affirmation.

80 I understand “suspense” here not so much in the sense of “rival scenarios envisaged about the future” (Sternberg 2010, 640), but in the sense of a readerly, “prospective” impatience to see K. explore the world of the castle. 81 “Das Aufkommen einer Spannung ist hier ausgeschlossen, weil jeder geringste Ansatz zu einer Entwicklung sofort wieder durch eine Aufhebung erstickt wird. Das führt zu einer gewissen Monotonie, ja sogar zur Langeweile” (Walser 1992, 117).

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As Walser (1992, 83–84) notes, the battle of world orders is, however, not dialectical, because the two orders are too different to constitute effective counterparts. Instead of a plot dynamics of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the battle thus always ends on K.’s falling back into his initial state. What therefore constitutes the plot of Das Schloss is, according to Walser’s analysis, an iterative structure, namely K.’s repeated attempts to prevail over the castle, which are always followed by the castle’s repelling of K.’s venture. For Walser, the idea of “doing” (i.e. of acting) thus loses its pragmatic sense; each and every kind of teleological progress or development is impossible in a world where two forces counterbalance each other.82 Engel may thus have Walser’s analysis in mind as he speaks about the absence of teleological emplotment. If one accepts Walser’s analysis, there is nonetheless still one question left unanswered. How can the novel be iterative – and thus non-developmental (due to the mutual elimination of world orders) – and at the same time teleological (due to K.’s goal to get in touch with the castle)? One way of answering this question is to consider the plot as series of failures. The teleological dimension keeps K. trying to reach the castle, but the anti-teleological, “epic” dimension brings about the repeated failure of this venture. Another way of conciliating teleology and iteration consists of the idea that the teleological dimension refers only to K., but not to the plot. K.’s personal telos is so unreachable that it becomes a teleological-virtual background of his actions. This background motivates his way of acting and thinking,83 but does not directly motivate the development of the plot insofar as K.’s goal is somehow detached from the particular episodes. This is why the various dialogues, situations and action elements develop so disturbingly unforeseeably. One event produces the next, thus producing a “chain” of events whose “last” (i.e. virtual-teleological) element (the entrance into the castle or the dialogue with Klamm) is postponed forever. K.’s goal is, so to speak, a pretext, which allows to recount freely a number of episodes, which happen instead of the central event. As Allemann puts it: Die unvermindert aufrechterhaltene Spannung zur nicht zugänglichen Schloßwelt und ihren Behörden schafft [. . .] erst die thematische Basis für eine linear (theoretisch bis ins

82 “Das heißt also, als allgemeinste Aussage über Kafkas Romane, daß Tun seinen pragmatischen Sinn verliert; jedem Tun ist seine Aufhebung immanent, weil es bei Kafka nur Tun von einander fremden Ordnungen gibt, und diese heben ihnen seinsfremde Tätigkeit eo ipso auf. Darum wird die Wiederholung zu einer Notwendigkeit” (Walser 1992, 84). 83 As Müller (2008) argues, K.’s whole thinking and acting is dominated by his competition with the castle. Additionally, the people around him are evaluated only according to their utility for this competition.

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Unendliche) sich fortsetzende lange Prosa-Erzählung mit der Fülle ihres Episoden- und (Allemann 1998, 208) Situationen-Reichtums [. . .].84

If Allemann emphasises the “linear” way in which the narrative develops, she implicitly contrasts Kafka’s novel with what, in narrative theory, counts as a criterion of narrativity, namely the hierarchical organisation of the action.85 Prince, for instance, claims that “[n]arrative is usually not a simple concatenation of events in time but a hierarchical one” (1982, 151–152). While the plot of Das Schloss respects the (perhaps most basic) criterion of the temporal succession of events,86 it infringes a criterion of tellability according to which the merely chronological development is backed up by “semantic complexity” (Ryan 2005b, 590) on the level of plot – be it a “rich a field of unrealised possibilities” (590), i.e. a network of plot alternatives (Will K. do this or that? What will happened if . . . ?) or the divergence and convergence of different storylines. What Kafka’s novel offers instead is a “flat”, i.e. a quasi non-hierarchical, syntagmatic-chronological narration of K.’s experiences in the village. Considered from this perspective, the novel subverts norms of “tellable” emplotment by its “rhizomatic” flatness.87

84 “It is the continuous tension toward the inaccessible world of the castle and its institutions that creates the thematic background for a narrative that can be continued linearly ad infinitum, with a plethora of episodes and situations that are simultaneously strictly confined to the sphere, snowed under, of castle and village” (translation mine). 85 The criterion of the hierarchical organisation of the action can be understood in perspectival, causal or goal-related terms. Concerning perspectival hierarchy, Uspensky (1973, 10), for instance, notes: “If the various viewpoints are not subordinated, but are presented as essentially equal ideological voices, we have a polyphonic narration.” Concerning causal hierarchy, Trabasso, Secco and Van den Broek (1984) have argued that the readerly establishment of causal coherence lives by the differentiation between super- and subordinated causal facts (i.e. by the establishment of a causal chain and its branches). Concerning the hierarchy of goals, Graesser, Singer and Trabasso (1994, 382) claim that, according to Constructionist Theory, “superordinate goals of existing plans that may end up being achieved in the future plot (class 4 inferences)” are generated online by readers. 86 Walser (1992, 120–121), however, has noted that the diegetic time in Das Schloss does not follow natural rules. In the fictional world, winter is much longer than in ours; dusk begins two hours after breakfast and the character seems to skip whole days. Walser thus suggests that Kafka uses temporal elements not in terms of an ordinary temporal development (since the idea of development contradicts the poetic form of Kafka’s prose), but more freely, as a “means of expression” (“Ausdrucksmittel”, 120). Nonetheless, it seems to me that readers do not have much difficulty to follow the action that is represented as a series of events. The structure of the diegetic time may differ from ours, but the diegetic time “flows” as much as ours, producing a “linear” chain of events. 87 “All multiplicities are flat” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9). See my presentation of the Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” in section 1.5.

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Many scholars have pointed to this linearity of Kafka’s prose. Camus, for instance, describes Das Schloss as follows: “Chaque chapitre est un échec. Et aussi un recommencement. Ce n’est pas de la logique, mais de l’esprit de suite. L’ampleur de cet entêtement fait le tragique de l’œuvre” (1974, 177).88 Walser (1992, 42–43) connects Kafka’s linearity primarily to the lack of an authorial perspective, i.e. to the “congruence” between character and author.89 The world lacks the “breadth” of detailed, transpersonal knowledge that omniscient narrators generally give to it insofar as readers are confined to experience the fictive world – mainly –90 through K.91 For Walser, Kafka’s narrative unfolds thus “out if itself, as an irreversible, linear process” (“Entfaltung des Werkes von sich selbst her als unumkehrbarer, linearer [. . .] Vorgang”, 43); it progresses (in an essentially epic manner) “step by step” (25, translation mine), due to the absence of a retrospective advance in knowledge, since the events are narrated in the same way in which the character, ignorant of later insights and revelations, experiences them: from moment to moment.

5.3.5 Causality Campbell’s (1986) analysis of the “subversion of plot” in Das Schloss lays bare another way in which the novel deviates from norms of emplotment, namely through its strange kind of causality.92 Campbell starts by examining the extent to which the story that K. tells about himself is “fraught with inconsistencies” (390). She studies convincingly the “numerous contradictions in K.s account of himself” (1986, 387), be it K.’s assertion that he is a land surveyor, his claim that his two assistants are on their way to the village or his assertion of having a wife and family, left behind. She then turns to the indeed [. . .] surprising fact that K.s prevarications actually have no direct consequence for the action! It is this, and not simply his inconsistent behaviour, which fundamentally renders

88 “Each chapter is a new frustration. And also a new beginning. It is not logic but consistent method. The scope of that insistence constitutes the work’s tragic quality” (Camus 1963, 151). 89 Schuster (2012, 91) criticises that Walser does not distinguish adequately between different narrative levels, i.e. that Walser mingles the author and the narrator. 90 See section 5.2.3. 91 “‘Breit’ im Sinne mannigfaltiger Fülle ist die in dieser Weise erzählte Welt nicht” (Walser 1992, 43). 92 The dimension of causality can be aligned with the idea of linearity and flatness insofar as the novel does not offer readers a network of super- and subordinate causes and effects (even though the novel certainly challenges readers to construct one on their own terms).

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the plot of the novel problematical. Not a single one of the suspicious claims K. makes is ever exposed as contradictory by the village people, although he makes each claim publicly, and reports of his words and actions obviously circulate through the village with great speed. (Campbell 1986, 393)

Furthermore, Campbell notes that the villagers adopt a clearly hostile attitude towards K., although they never openly accuse him for his lies and/or selfcontradictions. According to Campbell, it is as if the effect of K.’s lies – hostility – is given, but the cause of this effect – the detection and exposure of K.’s lies – is being erased (or withdrawn): “The hostility of the villagers toward K. makes the more incongruous their apparent obliviousness to precisely those inconsistencies in his speech and actions that would give them greatest reason to mistrust him” (394). According to Campbell, the subversion of the plot can therefore be analysed as a “displacement93 of conventional cause-and-effect-patterning in K.’s interaction with the villagers” (394).94 Causality is thus not strictly absent from the plot, but exists only subliminally, challenging readers to reconstruct causal links that are withdrawn from the plot. This withdrawal of causality does not only concern the villagers, but the protagonist as well whose behaviour and motives are as mysterious as those of the village people (see Zeller 1986, 283). One could contradict Campbell’s analysis, however, by arguing that nothing prevents readers from developing hypotheses on the reasons for K.’s and the villagers’ behaviour and from laying bare, by detailed analysis, K.’s selfcontradictions for and by themselves. This is surely true, but does not change the fact that the plot as such forgoes causal links and passes over K.’s selfcontradictions; they are not made the subject of any dialogue. Interestingly, Momus’s protocol, the only passage that makes K.’s lies a subject of discussion (and that thus offers a possible causal link to the villagers’ behaviour), has been discarded by Kafka (see Campbell 1986, 399), which might be considered as a strategic means by which Kafka wanted to maintain the ambiguity of the

93 At least since Neumann’s (1973) analysis of the particular kind of Kafka’s paradoxality, “displacement” (“Verschiebung”) and related ideas (such as “Ablenkung”, “Abweichung”, “Abschweifen”, “Schwenken”) are important key terms for the characterisation of the logical structure of Kafka’s texts. 94 According to Campbell (1986), this subversion of causal structures has an effect on its own. It deemphasises K.’s inconsistent behaviour. As Campbell argues, the “unusual narrative perspective” (395) produces this effect as well. This concealment of K.’s “villainy” (396), which is structurally induced, may be one of the reasons why the research literature has for a long time passed over K.’s self-contradictions and lies. Scholars present him unscrupulously as a land surveyor, as a husband or father and ignore “the pretexts and rationalizations he fabricates in order to make his presence in the village acceptable to its inhabitants” (399).

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plot, that is, the difficulty of conceptualising the relationship between K. and the villagers in a coherent – causal – way.

5.3.6 Surprise and curiosity Another suggestive remark on Kafka, which goes broadly in the same direction, has been made by Sternberg (1992), who pertains actually to the first group of researchers presented above: he only casts a short glance at Kafka in order to exemplify his own narrative theory.95 Sternberg analyses narrativity in terms of gap-filling activities, surprise being one of its three fundamental effects, beside suspense and curiosity.96 Theorising “surprise” generally as one of the “three master functions of narrative” (Sternberg 1992, 534), Sternberg argues that [t]here is no shock of discovery without a hidden gap in plot continuity for the reader to discover behind time, no reversal of narrative expectation without a more or less imperceptible reversal of chronology in the narrative: late before early, effect before cause, deed before doer’s (real) motive, world-stuff before world-picture, always secretly distributed to give a first and false impression – persuasive yet at best partial – before full and true knowledge is attained, if only knowledge of the trick played by art on our ignorance, credulity, stock responses, habits of reading and thinking. (Sternberg 1992, 519, emphasis mine)

Already this general description of the narrative mechanism of surprise complies partly well with the structure of Kafka’s narrative(s). The readers’ knowledge about Kafka’s fictional universe is always partial, full of gaps of information.97 Sternberg’s effect-before-cause criterion complies with Kafka’s Schloss as well. According to Zeller (1986), many sanctions are imposed on K., but the exact cause for these sanctions remains obscure, precisely because it is impossible for K. to deduce general rules from the particular sanctions. In other words, K. experiences negative effects without being able to acknowledge the respective causes, such that the sanctions always come as a surprise.

95 I have nonetheless decided to present his ideas in this chapter because his considerations allow for the exploration of another aspect of Kafka’s deviant emplotment, namely that of surprise. 96 See my summary of Sternberg’s approach in chapter 2. 97 Additionally, Walser (1992, 23) has noted that the atmosphere created by a work depends on whether the narrator allows readers to be in advance of the protagonist, who is groping in the dark of ignorance, or whether narrators force readers to grope with him in the dark and are surprised whenever he is surprised. The latter is a valid description of what happens, on the level of narrative communication, in Das Schloss.

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Sternberg himself theorises Kafka’s narrativity in terms of an expansion of the surprise mechanism. According to this extended conception, surprise does not represent a sudden, punctual revelation of what has been constructed as a gap of information, but a dominant mechanism, which governs the whole plot: [. . .] the surprise mechanism freely extends in magnitude: from a single covert gap [. . .] to an entire plot disordered into a series of revelations (a mystery tale, a Jane Austen novel, any narrative based on round – and so, unpredictable – character or existential instability, Kafka-fashion). (Sternberg 1992, 520, emphasis mine)

Although Sternberg does not explicitly elaborate on the connection between the “existential instability” of Kafka’s novels and the mechanism of surprise, it seems that the two aspects overlap in the novel’s narration of “effects before cause, deed before doer’s (real) motive, world-stuff before world-picture” (Sternberg 1992, 519), a phenomenon that amounts actually to a lack of coherence. I therefore agree with Sternberg’s analysis of “Kafka-fashion” narratives as being related (inter alia) to the mechanism of surprise,98 but I have to make one reservation. Surprise, in Sternberg’s sense, comes along with a moment of “recognition” (2010, 640) according to which an element completes the picture in an unexpected way. This element creates an unexpected kind of coherence (for example, when, in a crime novel, the identity of the murderer is finally revealed). But do readers of Das Schloss ever come to see the whole picture? Does the novel ever allow readers to completely understand what has happened? We have already seen that the kinds of recognition or coherence that the novel offers are quite restricted (due to polyperspectivity, see section 5.2. 3). As Zeller (1986, 288) argues, the various dialogues provide a thematic, but not a logical coherence. New information tends to be incoherent with older information such that an effect of confusion is created, and that always anew. Sternberg’s idea of “existential instability” seeks obviously to broaden the notion of surprise, such that it can be applied to Kafka. Nonetheless, Sternberg cannot conceal the fundamental incompatibility between his theoretical notion of surprise, based on a moment of “recognition”, and Kafka’s narratives, which never allow readers to attain “full and true knowledge” (Sternberg 1992, 519). Moreover, this irreducible non-coherence makes it difficult to distinguish clearly, in the analysis of Kafka’s stories, between Sternberg’s narrative “master functions” of curiosity and surprise. According to Sternberg, curiosity arises when the narrative, “[r]ather than diverting attention from a missing antecedent, [. . .]

98 See also Walser’s (1992, 23) remarks on the dimension of surprise and “revelations” in Kafka’s narratives.

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signals or even focuses its absence and the resultant loss in coherence” (1992, 524). He contrasts curiosity and surprise as follows: “where a surprise gap is disclosed without being closed – the detective, say, shakes a perfect-looking alibi –, it necessarily modulates into curiosity: false assurance into a quest for knowledge. Distinct, the two master interests are yet convertible” (525). If we apply these concepts to Das Schloss, which indeed focuses attention on missing antecedents (for example, on the reason for the “impossibility” of talking to Klamm), the idea of curiosity seems to describe the novel’s emplotment more adequately than the idea of surprise insofar as the narrative represents but an extended quest for knowledge – undertaken both by K. and the reader. To summarise the insights gained so far, the emplotment of Das Schloss brings into play both a teleological and a causal dimension, but paradoxically neither the former nor the latter manifest themselves at the level of plot. The only telos (direct contact to the castle) withdraws itself, receding into the distance of the virtual and unreachable. Causes for the action – be it the cause for K.’s arrival in the village, for his idée fixe of entering the castle or for the villagers’ hostility and sanctions – are withdrawn as well, receding into the untold. Moreover, the novel creates constantly new effects of curiosity and (at least on the micro-level of narrative structure) surprise, but refuses any durable insight into both K.’s true identity and the rules that govern the world of village and castle. The effect of this strange emplotment is, again, a kind of syntagmatic flatness: the impression of a purely chronological and virtually endless chain of dialogues and episodes, which are paradoxically simultaneously closely intertwined with99 and independent from100 K.’s unreachable goal.

5.3.7 A paradigmatic plot This “flat”, episodic shape of the narrative can be explained in terms of Chambers’s (1994) paradigmatic “etcetera principle”. Insofar as always new 99 As I have argued elsewhere, the castle corresponds to what K. learns about it in the dialogues: “Nous voyons ici qu’on ne peut guère faire la différence entre le château comme localité, comme concept et comme langage. La recherche spatiale du château coïncide avec l’effort de K. de construire un concept cohérent du château à partir des renseignements que lui donnent les villageois” (Wagner 2011, 7). If the castle is nothing but an effect of speech, then the dialogues are of course closely intertwined with the castle insofar as they constitute it. 100 “Independence”, in this context, refers to the virtuality of K.’s getting in touch with the castle. Insofar as the virtual is per definitionem separated from the realm of the real (see sections 1.6 and 2), the castle is separated and independent from what K. has access to, i.e. from what he is able to experience.

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incidents (could) lengthen the story, the action lacks the “effect of totality and closure” that Chambers ascribes to “syntagmatic” narratives. The novel’s flat emplotment corresponds therefore rather to the “paradigmatic”, which, as Chambers notes, manifests itself exemplarily in descriptions, which are always open to an etcetera (that is, to further elements which could be included): The relatively loose cohesion of which description is capable derives from its comparability with practices such as those of nomenclature, of list-making and inventory, and it is for that reason that description introduces into the narrative paradigm, which would be incomplete without it, the principle of disorder and inertia I have mentioned, i.e. that relaxation of structure, the outcome of which is described by words like discontinuity and fragmentation. (Chambers 1994, 7)

Chambers claims that narrativity not only lives by syntagmatic cohesion, but also by a paradigmatic etcetera, i.e. by discontinuity and fragmentation. Kafka’s novel is obviously a brilliant example of this claim – not only because of its abundantly episodic structure,101 but also because of its fragmentation. It is a well-known fact that Kafka experienced enormous difficulties to end his novel, to provide it with closure, leaving it (therefore?) as a fragment. Concerning the question of the novel’s narrativity, the present overview allows for two conclusions. First, yes-no questions – such as “Is Das Schloss a narrative?” or “Does it possess narrativity?” – seem to be little effective; the same is true for attempts to determine the novel’s “degree” of narrativity (see the disparate judgments on the novel’s boringness versus suspense). My second conclusion is thus that a more pertinent way of approaching Kafka’s narrativity consists of asking for the novel’s specific kind of narrativity. So far, we have discussed the ways in which the novel deviates from narrative norms of emplotment, such as eventfulness, hierarchy, teleology, development, causality, surprise and syntagmatic wholeness. I think, however, that the specificity of Kafka’s narrativity can be described even more systematically if one analyses the obstacles that it erects against the successful creation of coherence.

101 Heselhaus (1952, 368) equally highlights the episodic structure of the novel, comparing it to the technique of episodic isolation, which can be found in fairy tales. Heselhaus emphasises, however, that the succession of punctual episodes are held together by the will and effort of K. to get to the castle. It is this paradox of teleological episodicity that I try to cover with the term of “teleological background” (see above).

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5.4 Techniques and effects of narrative withdrawal 5.4.1 Withdrawal of meaning and allegorical interpretations A large amount of scholars characterise – and appreciate – Kafka’s narratives for their resistance against comprehension and meaning-making, that is, against the creation of an interpretative gestalt. Analysing Das Urteil, Phelan, for instance, argues that “the novel is not powerful despite the fact that the events resist each and every effort of comprehension; it owes part of its power to this very resistance”102 (2011, 103, translation mine). Thorlby goes in a similar direction arguing (with regard to the imperial message, sent out in Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer): “For Kafka, then, and for us as we read him, the interest and pathos and humor of our situation resides not in our getting the point of it, but in our failing to do so” (1987, 37). Beicken, for his part, emphasises positively the “withdrawal of meaning” – as opposed to a hidden meaning, which would have to be “deciphered” – as a characteristic of Kafka’s texts, as he draws on a statement of Walter Benjamin: Diese [Benjamin’s, ESW] Einsicht, die dahin geht, daß Kafka den positiv bestimmbaren Sinn vorenthält, obwohl der Gleichnischaracter seiner Werke umso stärker auf einen verborgenen anspielt, reißt die Perspektive der Verschlüsselung auf und stellt den Sinnentzug in den (Beicken 1974, 111) Mittelpunkt. Viel ist damit gewonnen.103

And Schenk (2005, 238) argues, with regard to Das Schloss, that “the recursive [. . .] structures constitute a narration that withdraws possibilities of sensemaking” (translation mine). Early research on Kafka, beginning with Brod, has tried to come to terms with this withdrawal of meaning by assigning allegorical meaning to Kafka’s narratives, also to the castle in Das Schloss.104 Since Benjamin’s considerations

102 “[. . .] la nouvelle n’est pas forte en dépit du fait que les événements résistent à toute tentative de compréhension, elle tire une partie de sa force du fait même de cette résistance” (Phelan 2011, 103). 103 “This [Benjamin’s] insight according to which Kafka withholds the positively ascertainable meaning, although the parabolic quality of his works makes all the more an allusion to a concealed meaning, debunks the idea of encipherment and draws attention to the withdrawal of meaning. Much is thereby gained” (translation mine). 104 “Die meisten Interpreten haben sich darauf konzentriert, die Frage zu beantworten, was das rätselhafte Schloss im Roman bedeutet [. . .]. Die Antworten fielen sehr unterschiedlich aus: eine Erscheinung der göttlichen Gnade, die ostjüdische Lebenswelt, die ineffektive Bürokratie Österreich-Ungarns, die moderne verwaltete Welt, die Freudsche Vaterinstanz, die Literatur, etc. etc. Schon die Fülle der Antworten lässt vermuten, dass die Frage falsch gestellt ist” (Engel 2013, 183).

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on Kafka, a broad consensus has emerged according to which allegorical interpretations miss the target.105 As far as I see, it is generally one (or more) of the following four arguments that are regularly put forward against allegorical approaches. (i) Allegorical interpretations project ready-made patterns of thought onto the narrative, thereby misusing the text for the illustration of essentially outertextual (philosophical, political, religious, etc.) configurations. In other words, the text itself often does not provide enough evidence that would legitimate the reference to outer-textual systems of thought. (ii) Allegorical interpretations fail to take the narrative’s richness of detail into account. In other words, by drawing eclectically only on those narrative elements that lend themselves to the alleged allegorical pattern, such interpretations distort the narrative’s gestalt.106 (iii) Allegorical interpretations fail to do justice to the concreteness and vividness that characterises Kafka’s narrated worlds, due to their comparatively high degree of abstractness. Although allegorical interpretations can reveal patterns that pertain both to the narrative structure and to the respective allegorised system of thought, the allegorical meanings often remain fairly detached from the concrete images and atmospheres of Kafka’s novels. As a consequence, there is a vast distance, hard to legitimise, between the textual givens and the alleged interpretative-allegorical meaning(s). (iv) Kafka himself has explicitly denied allegory its poetic value, describing it as a “dry” device, incapable both of alluding to anything else than itself and of reaching beneath the surface of things.107 Nowadays, it is a truism among scholars that allegorisation is not an adequate response to Kafka’s texts.108 In my opinion, a more adequate way of approaching Kafka consists of doing research into what seduces scholars to develop allegorical interpretations: the withdrawal of meaning itself. How does Kafka create this effect? 105 As Fromm (2010, 303) puts it: “Die Bezüge im Bildbereich sperren sich gegen eine Übersetzung in den Sachbereich.” The problem of allegory has, for example, also been addressed by Fromm (2010, 303), Sheppard (1979, 445–448), Beicken (1974), Kessler (1983, 15–16) and Villiger (2010, 75). 106 As Engel (2013, 183) puts it: “Kafkas fiktionale Welten lassen sich nie ohne Rest allegorisch auflösen.” 107 “Aber unüberwindbar bleibt für mich der trockene Aufbau der ganzen Allegorie, die nichts ist als Allegorie, alles sagt, was zu sagen ist, nirgends ins Tiefere geht und ins Tiefere zieht” (letter to Grete Bloch, 6th of June 1914, B, 81–82). 108 See Engel (2013, 183).

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5.4.2 Withdrawal of consistency I contend that Kafka’s withdrawal of meaning is based on a systematic withdrawal of textual consistency, which holds the reader in a continuous process of coherence in progress. This hypothesis is consistent with my pyramidal model of narrativity (see chapter 2) according to which text-reader interactions that do not achieve the level of resultative narrativity can (possibly) be located one stage below, on the level of narrativity in actualisation, where readers work towards the creation of an interpretative coherence without having already achieved it. In other words, I assume that Kafka somehow traps readers in the stage of narrative dynamics, preventing them both from abandoning their efforts of comprehension (which would mean to fall back on the level of virtual narrativity) and from leading their efforts to a successful result (which would be an ascent onto the levels of resultative narrativity and of narrative “meaning”). But what about allegorical interpretations? Can’t they be considered to represent an ascent onto the level of resultative narrativity and onto the pyramidal summit of meaning? Don’t they borrow the needed coherence from an outertextual system of ideas? I tend to answer these questions in the affirmative. By matching textual structures with an outer-textual system of ideas, allegorical interpretations provide the text with a semblance of coherence and meaning. Nonetheless, this kind of ascent is not fully successful, since it is not an entirely legitimate approach.109 The lack of legitimacy can be explained not only in terms of the critical arguments against allegorisation summarised above, but also by the fact that allegorical interpretations ignore a (if not the) fundamental, paradoxical quality of Kafkas’s narratives: they simultaneously call for and disallow interpretation. Adorno’s famous dictum, according to which “[e]ach sentence says ‘interpret me’, and none will permit it” (1967, 246), captures the central quality of Kafka’s narrativity: it triggers a search for coherence and meaning, but resultative coherence can neither be achieved nor abandoned as a goal. The consequence of this paradoxical quality is the necessity of interpretative failure. If one interprets the text (allegorically), one fails the text by closing its intended openness, by disambiguising its essential ambiguity and by providing a background of reference that Kafka’s texts intentionally withhold. But if one does not follow the text’s call for (allegorical) interpretation, one is

109 It should be noted that such allegorical projections are often not as arbitrary as critics affirm, since they are based on structural parallels between the story and the respective allegorical comparandum.

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stuck in an uncomfortable (“Kafkaesque”) feeling of non-understanding – and of frustration,110 comparable to that of an Odysseus who is exposed to the dangerously seducing chant of the Sirens. As I have argued elsewhere, the best choice one can make in view of this alternative is perhaps that of making no choice at all111: the best understanding may be achieved by ascertaining, from a distance (or meta-level), the text’s “double-bind”, its simultaneous call for and resistance against meaning and coherence, since this is what characterises Kafka’s narrativity. But by which means does Kafka create this literary doublebind? In other words: (1) How does the text trigger readers to search for a coherent gestalt (= thwarted ascent onto the level resultative narrativity)? (2) How does the text prevent readers from breaking off their search for coherence and meaning despite its ineffectiveness (= inhibited descent onto the level of virtual narrativity)? As far as I see, one of the best answers to these questions has been given by Zeller (1986). After his considerations on the question of perspective in Das Schloss, Zeller focuses on the role that rules play in the novel. According to Zeller, the story suggests that there is a number of rules that seem to govern the sphere of village and castle, but these rules remain mostly opaque and implicit. As a consequence (and this is an answer to the first question), the reader is challenged to deduce the unwritten rules – which manifest themselves only negatively, in the form of sanctions (see Zeller 1986, 282–283) – from the text. The text thus triggers the curiosity of readers, who want to understand in terms of which system of rules K. is being judged by the villagers. As Zeller convincingly argues, the reader’s attempts must fail, since the system of rules cannot be reconstructed.112 But not

110 Miller observes a similar effect: “Disorientation, claustrophobia, vertigo, frustration are her [the reader’s, ESW] responses to all this uncertainty, but they only magnify the unfulfilled yearning for certainty” (1991, 139). 111 “Or, quand le lecteur commence à avoir du mal à faire ce choix, face à l’impératif herméneutique d’une écriture qui invoque à la fois la force de ses images présentes et l’absence de leur sens – quand il se sent déchiré entre l’intransitivité imaginaire et la transitivité allégorique de l’écriture de Kafka et Beckett, c’est là peut-être qu’il la comprend le mieux” (Wagner 2011, 12). 112 “Die impliziten, für die Dorfbewohner maßgebenden Regeln, für deren Übertretung K. so oft sanktioniert wird –, [sic] nämlich durch Tätlichkeiten, durch verbale und gestische Drohungen, Schelten, Schweigen usw. – diese Regeln lassen sich nicht formulieren und nicht erkennen” (Zeller 1986, 283).

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only the rules of the village remain opaque – also K.’s own intentions and motivations remain obscure.113 Zeller argues that Kafka achieves these effects by providing a richness of detail, which fails to partake in a coherent whole. In other words, the particular and the general become detached from each other and the latter cannot be deduced from the former: Der Text formuliert beliebig viele Details, trotzdem – oder deswegen – ist das Allgemeine nicht zu erkennen, weil die Einzelheiten sich nicht zum Zusammenhang ergänzen lassen. Das Besondere erweist sich als nicht generalisierbar. Das Generelle ist weder ableitbar, (Zeller 1986, 284) noch wird es ausgesprochen.114

If readers are to deduce something from the diegetic events, it is only the following insight: the world presented by the text and the rules on which this world is built are essentially different from the world as we know it. In the sphere of castle and village, it seems, for instance, that the less important the infringement of a rule is, the harder the corresponding sanction; and the higher the position of the official is, the lower seems to be his interest in making people adhere the rules. Sometimes, it even becomes questionable whether there are rules at all, or whether these “rules” are only a superstitious belief of the villagers (see Zeller 1986, 284–285). Correspondingly, interlocutors of K. emphasise repeatedly that K. is unable to understand anything and that he misinterprets everything.115 In the light of these observations, Zeller argues that K. is designed as a cognitive model of the reader (in Eco’s sense). Like K., readers find themselves in an unfamiliar, incomprehensible world, but they are implicitly challenged to react differently than K. (who generalises and judges authorities, letters and judgments from his own, inappropriate point of view, see Zeller 1986, 285). 113 As Cohn points out, readers “are able to accept K. as a riddle” (1968, 36), but only in the third-person form. Zeller emphasises the impact that K.’s opacity, but also his wrongs have onto readers. The more readers perceive K.’s behaviour and understanding as inadequate, the more they will work towards doing better than K. For Zeller, the exuberant amount of interpretations is thus one of the direct consequences of K.’s wrongs: “Indem K. sich ins Unrecht setzt, gibt er den Entzifferungs- und Modellierungsbemühungen des Lesers neuen Aufschwung – mit bisher, wie man weiß, nicht aussetzendem Erfolg. Diese teilweise inkohärente Textur von Kafkas Werken ist ein wesentlicher Grund dafür, daß sie zu mehr Interpretationen und stärker divergierenden Deutungen Anlaß geben als die anderer Autoren” (Zeller 1986, 287). 114 “The text offers a broad range of details at will, nonetheless (or therefore) the general cannot be perceived, because the particular details do not form jointly a coherent whole. The general can neither be deduced, nor is it made explicit” (here and hereafter translation mine). 115 See, for instance, Gardena’s comments: “[D]er Kopf schwirrt einem, wenn man Ihnen zuhört und wenn man das was Sie sagen und meinen in Gedanken mit der wirklichen Lage vergleicht” (S, 90). “Sie mißdeuten alles, auch das Schweigen. Sie können eben nicht anders” (S, 129).

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But if the rules that govern the village and the castle cannot be determined, why do readers not throw the book into the corner and simply give up the search for coherence (second question)? According to Zeller, the decisive point here is that the world is not incomprehensible in all areas. Especially in the beginning, the reader “is entitled to believe that s/he understands” (286, translation mine). The reader can recognise, for example, elements of a feudal order.116 These familiar elements tempt readers to engage in processes of coherence in progress. These interpretative processes, however, do not result in the successful creation of a coherent representation, but in interpretative cycles in which the creation and subsequent dismissal of world models take turns: Entscheidend ist aber, daß die “Schloß”-Welt nicht völlig unverständlich erscheint. Es wurde bereits darauf hingewiesen, daß am Anfang des Romans ganz “vernünftige” Regeln aufgestellt werden [ . . . .]. Der Leser darf glauben, daß er versteht. Er läßt sich auf den Text ein und geht gläubig daran, diese Zeichen zu decodieren, d.h. Modelle für die dargestellte Welt zu entwerfen und sie wieder zu verwerfen, ohne damit an ein Ende zu gelangen. [. . .] Zu neuen Versuchen sieht man sich ermutigt, weil nicht alles unverständlich ist: Auch die (Zeller 1986, 286) Regel der Unverständlichkeit darf man nicht generalisieren!117

Interestingly, Zeller’s analysis complies well with Neumann’s (1973) epochal hypothesis according to which the “sliding paradox” (“gleitendes Paradox”) is a determining figure of thought in Kafka’s texts. Before I explore the overlap between these two approaches, we should have a look at Neumann’s considerations on Kafka’s paradox: Kafkas ‘Paradox’ verkoppelt die ‘Umkehrung’, die einer der Mechanismen des traditionellen Paradoxes ist, mit der ‘Ablenkung’, die vorläufig als ein ‘Verfehlen’ der trivialen Denkerwartung, als ein Weggelocktwerden von ihr gekennzeichnet sei. Durch dieses Verfahren werden die Begriffe dem ‘normalen’, schlüssigen Denken entzogen, ohne doch andererseits durch das platte Paradox – als das inzwischen schon traditionell gewordene Merkzeichen des Unbegreiflichen – neuerlich und noch viel entschiedener

116 See also Engel (2013), who analyses the castle in terms of Weber’s sociology and comes to the conclusion that it combines elements of three different types of societal systems. 117 “What is decisive, however, is that the world of the ‘Castle’ is not incomprehensible in all aspects. It has already been emphasised that the beginning of the novel establishes quite ‘reasonable’ rules. [. . .] The reader may think that s/he understands. S/He becomes involved with the text and starts faithfully to decode the signs, that is, to develop models for the represented world and to discard them subsequently, without coming to end with it. [. . .] One feels encouraged to make new attempts [of comprehension], because not all and everything is incomprehensible. Not even the rule of unintelligibility may be generalised!” (Translation mine).

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verstellt zu werden. Kafkas ‘gleitendes Paradox’ schafft eine Zone des Denkens zwischen konventioneller Stimmigkeit und jener besonderen Form der Alogik, die ‘paradox’ heißt.118 (Neumann 1973, 463, emphasis mine)

If one compares Zeller’s and Neumann’s approaches, one comes to see that the two scholars illuminate the same effect of Kafka’s narratives: the creation of a mental zone of “betweenness”, which extends between consistency (Neumann’s “konventionell[e] Stimmigkeit” [conventional consistency]) and plain incomprehensibility (Neumann’s “Alogik” [illogicality]). This betweenness obviously presents a specific (“Kafkaesque”) challenge to readers whose ordinary devices of meaning-making (inferences; deducing the general from the particular; application of “encyclopaedic” knowledge, etc.) remain at large ineffective, precisely because the text is designed to escape from conceptual, logical, categorical – that is, from any kind of “pre-structured” – thinking. If Kafka’s texts withdraw meaning, it is because their specific inconsistencies challenge readers to leave their familiar lines of thought. Kafka’s texts thus seems to involve three consequent dimensions of withdrawal: (i) they systematically withdraw conceptual consistency; as an effect, (ii) readers are incited to leave their familiar modes of thought (thus experiencing, as one could say in Deleuzian terms, a kind of mental “deterritorialisation”); (iii) as a result, the readers’ knowledge, categories and operations of meaning-making cannot be successfully applied any more, such that meaning withdraws. Various researchers have highlighted in diverse contexts both the textual withdrawal of consistency in Kafka’s texts and the fact that schematic (i.e. pre-structured, categorical) thinking was indeed repugnant to Kafka,119 be it in terms of allegory (see above), metaphors120 or antitheses.121 Kafka himself explicitly assails

118 “Kafka’s ‘paradox’ combines ‘inversion’, which is one of the mechanisms of the traditional paradox, with ‘deflection’, which can provisionally be characterised as a ‘being off’ habitual way of thinking, as being-enticed-away from them. It is in terms of this technique that concepts are withdrawn from ‘ordinary’, conclusive thinking, but without being distorted anew (and even much more definitely) by the flat paradox, which has meanwhile become the traditional mark of the incomprehensible. Kafka’s ‘sliding paradox’ creates a zone of thinking that extends between conventional consistency and that special form of illogicality that is called ‘paradox’” (translation mine). 119 “Das Grauenhafte des bloß Schematischen” (T, 517). 120 Bonnefoy (2008, 15), for instance, argues as follows: “Partout chez Kafka le travail métaphorique est brisé dans l’œuf [. . .].” “[L]es écrits de Kafka ont ceci d’extraordinaire, de décisif, qu’ils démontrent, de façon concrète autant que toujours recommencée, l’impossibilité pour l’esprit, pour la recherche de vérité, de s’établir au plan de la métaphore” (2008, 14). Neumann (1973) identifies the “enstranging metaphor” (“entfremdende Metapher”, 1980, 486) as one of three narrative strategies by which Kafka evades schematic thinking. 121 See, for example, Neumann (1973, 473–475).

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antitheses for their lack of ingeniosity and of nuances in his diary (entry of the 20th of November 1911): Sicher ist mein Widerwille gegen Antithesen. Sie kommen zwar unerwartet, aber überraschen nicht, denn sie sind immer ganz nah vorhanden gewesen; wenn sie unbewußt waren, so waren sie es nur am äußersten Rande. Sie erzeugen zwar Gründlichkeit, Fülle, Lückenlosigkeit aber nur so wie eine Figur im Lebensrad; unsern kleinen Einfall haben wir im Kreis herumgejagt. So verschieden sie sein können, so nuancenlos sind sie, wie von Wasser aufgeschwemmt wachsen sie einem unter der Hand, mit der anfänglichen Aussicht ins Grenzenlose und mit einer endlichen mittlern immer gleichen Größe. (T, 259)122

Kafka’s repugnance against antithetical, pre-structured, undifferentiated thinking can, however, not only be deduced from such biographical evidence. Researchers have shown how Kafka’s texts deconstruct binary and antithetical structures. Schößler (2008), for example, who examines the way both Goethe’s Lehrjahre and Kafka’ Schloss narrate the “disappearance” of the “sovereign subject” (2008, 151), equally emphasises Kafka’s negation of antithetical, binary structures. She argues, with a side-glance to Deleuze and Guattari, that Kafka’s paradoxes transform the “binarisms of the cultural order” – along with its reality effects – into “phantasms” and that a “method of active decomposition” (“Methode aktiver Zersetzung”) intensifies this device (see Schößler 2008, 161, translation mine). Gellhaus, for his part, who concentrates on spatial and temporal anomalies in Kafka’s narratives, relates Kafka’s resistance against schematic thinking to the author’s historical-scientific context, suggesting that Kafka transforms contemporary theories (e.g. Max Planck’s quantum theory, Einstein’s relativity theory) of the natural sciences into poetic devices: “Thesenhaft zugespitzt kann man sagen, daß Kafka die physikalische Theorie der Relativität von Raum und Zeit in ein poetisches Verfahren transformiert, um den in der Sprache erstarrten, das Denken behindernden Raum-Zeit-Schemata, [sic] zu entkommen”123 (2007, 285). Also the ambiguous focalisation of the novel (see section 5.2.3) partakes in the creation of textual inconsistency insofar as the reader often cannot

122 “My repugnance for antitheses is certain. They are unexpected, but do not surprise, for they have always been there; if they were unconscious, it was at the very edge of consciousness. They make for thoroughness, fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the ‘wheel of life’; we have chased our little idea around the circle. They are as undifferentiated as they are different, they grow under one’s hand as though bloated by water, beginning with the prospect of infinity, they always end up in the same medium size” (D1, 157). 123 “In a nutshell, my hypothesis could be summarised such that Kafka transforms the physical theory of the relativity of time and space into a poetic technique in order to evade the temporal and spatial schemata that have grown stiff in language and impede thinking” (translation mine).

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decide whether the events are described from the point of view of an extradiegetic narrator or whether it is K.’s perspective that filters the description. In other words, Kafka creates not only on the level of story, but also on the level of discourse a structure that hovers between two options. While there is a broad consensus in the research community according to which Kafka’s texts withdraw consistency, the analyses delivered on this topic have, as far as I see, until now not yet been brought together nor have they been systematised with regard to different techniques of withdrawal as a cognitotextual dynamics. I will work towards such a systematic account by examining in the following sections a number of techniques that are argued to bring about the specific narrativity of Kafka’s Schloss: contradictions, “conceptual drift”, inversions, play with dichotomies, metaleptic language use, “countermanding” speechacts and phenomena of “re- and deframing”. The borderlines of these techniques are partly fuzzy as they overlap and feed back on each other. I am analysing these techniques as strategies that contribute jointly to a broader dynamics of narrative withdrawal by which readers are systematically divested of coherence and, as a consequence, of intradiegetic reality and narrative meaning.

5.4.3 Contradictions: Entries into the interpretative burrow Contradictions infringe a traditional narratological requirement according to which a narrative is constituted by “any representation of non-contradictory events such that at least one occurs at a time t and another at a time t1 following time t” (Prince 1982, 145). In view of this basic requirement, it does not come as a surprise that many scholars have emphasised the great number of contradictions that characterise Kafka’s narratives, since they infringe the fundamental narrative expectation according to which “the hallmark of narrative is assurance. It lives in certainty: this happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened and it was related to that” (149).124 Campbell (1986) explores five types of K.’s self-contradictions in Das Schloss in detail. The first concerns K.’s alleged profession: K. is – or feigns to be – initially ignorant about the castle (“Ist denn hier ein Schloß?”, S, 8125), then he claims to be a land surveyor, employed by the castle (“daß ich der Landvermesser

124 In other words, if it is true that “narrative dies from sustained ignorance and indecision” (Prince 1982, 149), then Kafka’s Schloss would hardly be a good narrative. Nonetheless, given that the novels have been the object of lively debates for decades, the opposite seems to be the case. 125 “Is there a castle here?” (CA-M, 3).

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bin, den der Graf hat kommen lassen”, S, 9126), then he seems surprised (“K. horchte auf”, S, 12127) by the fact that the castle “had recognised him as the Land Surveyor” (CA-M, 6).128 Moreover, as Campbell argues convincingly, “K.’s assessment of the situation in antagonistic terms, as a ‘fight’; his suspicion that the castle recognizes him only in order to intimidate him – neither of these reflections makes any sense if he is who he claims to be, a land surveyor who was officially summoned and has duly appeared to do his job” (Campbell 1986, 388). A second bundle of self-contradictions concerns K.’s relationship to Artur and Jeremias. K. initially claims that his two assistants will be arriving shortly (“Nun werden bald meine Gehilfen kommen”, S, 14), but then he “promptly adopts two locals [. . .] as his assistants [. . .] in what appears to be a bizarre improvisational move” (Campbell 1986, 389). K.’s behaviour is indeed bizarre. He decides that they should be his “old assistants whom I told to follow me and whom I am expecting” (CA-M, 19), although he does not recognise them at all (“Wer seid Ihr? S, 31).129 Moreover, later, in his conversation with the Superintendent (Gemeindevorsteher), K. denies that they are his old assistants, arguing that they have just lately come to join him (“sie sind mir erst hier zugelaufen”, S, 99). Jeremias, for his part affirms later on that he and Artur had been sent to K. by the castle official Galater to cheer him up130 (see Campbell 1986, 389). The third kind of contradiction concerns K.’s wife and child. K. affirms that he has left them at home, but then openly announces his intentions to marry Frieda, thereby presenting himself to readers “as a liar at best and a potential bigamist at worst” (Campbell 1986, 390). Fourthly, K. complains to the Superintendent that he has been enticed to the village (“bis ich dann allerdings zum bösen Ende hergelockt wurde”, S, 118), but elsewhere he declares that he has come into the village of his own free will (“Ich bin aus eigenem Willen hierhergekommen und aus eigenem Willen habe ich mich hier festgehakt”, S, 313). Finally, as Campbell adds, K.’s “[a]llusions to the length of his projected stay in the village are also contradictory. If K. clearly implies to the Brückenhof proprietor that he intends to return home [. . .], he announces quite the opposite intentions elsewhere” (1986, 391), namely when he speaks with Frieda and Gerstäcker. In a nutshell, “one can easily demonstrate that K.’s ‘story’ is fraught with inconsistencies” (Campbell 1986, 390).

126 “I am the Land Surveyor whom the Count is expecting” (CA-M, 4). 127 “[H]e pricked up his ears” (CA-M, 6). 128 “Das Schloß hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt” (S, 12). 129 “Who are you?” (CA-M, 19). 130 Jeremias renders his dialogue with Galater; Galater’s precise wording: “Das Wichtigste aber ist, daß Ihr ihn ein wenig erheitert. Wie man mir berichtet, nimmt er alles sehr schwer” (S, 367–368).

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But can these contradictions not be solved if they are interpreted in their respective contexts? Campbell herself argues that K.’s numerous self-contradictions can be explained as “self-serving manoeuvres”: K. makes up things only in order to “fortify himself vis-à-vis the castle at every available opportunity” (Campbell 1986, 401). Whenever K. feels somehow threatened (e.g. when Schwarzer refuses him the permission to stay in the village) or whenever he encounters difficulties (e.g. as the Brückenhof proprietor mistrusts K.), he devises doubtful allegations, which contradict prior (or subsequent) information, but serve his instantaneous goals (see 400–401). Considered from this perspective, one could argue that K.’s self-contradictions do not comprise the narrative communication proper (and do thus not produce an effect of diegetic withdrawal), but that they refer us back to the diegetic character of K., revealing something about his (asocial, reckless, selfish)131 personality traits. While I partly agree with this objection, one should not overlook the uncertainties and interpretative challenges that K.’s self-contradictions engender anyway, even if they serve K.’s purposes. Readers are necessarily confused, for example, as to the question whether K. does have a home with a wife and child or not. Has he purposefully come to the village or not? Does he know, from the very beginning of the plot, about (at least the existence of) the castle? If he does, what is his relation to the castle? What does he know about it and what are his plans and goals on site? If his claim, according to which he is the count’s land surveyor, is only a rhetorical stratagem, as Campbell argues, how is it then possible that the castle confirms his fictive professional status? Does the castle cooperate under certain circumstances with K. by supporting his fallacious claims?132 But why would it do so and why does it not do so on other occasions? Instead of further elaborating on these questions, I would like to take a step backwards in order to examine the structure of the interpretative process in which we have just been involved. First, we have identified a number of contradictions. Then, we tried to solve these contradictions by attributing them to K. (instead of to the inconsistency of the narrative world). Finally, we found that this attribution leads to a number of further interpretative difficulties each of which would in turn require new research activities. I consider the structure of this interpretative process to be a typical effect of Kafka’s dynamics of withdrawal. Contradictions (or other difficulties of comprehension, see below)

131 “K. ist in radikalem Sinne a-sozial und ebenso rücksichts- wie skrupellos” (Engel 2013, 186). See also Müller (2008) and Henel (1967) for a comparable characterisation of K. 132 Henel’s (1967) hypothesis, according to which the castle and the village are projections of K., explains this fact, insofar as K. would then be able to provoke or control the actions of the “Gegenwelt”.

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trigger a process of coherence in progress, but every interpretative solution, which appears at first sight susceptible of dissolving the inconsistencies (i.e. of creating coherence), turns out to be the source of new inconsistencies and interpretative challenges – and so forth.133 Kafka’s narratives are designed such that the interpretative process – which aims at a coherent, self-consistent representation of the diegetic reality – cannot be successfully finished: coherence (and therefore meaning) escapes us. In other words, Kafka’s contradictions are like various entrances into an interpretative burrow134: they invite us to enter a large, complex network (or rhizome) of interconnected interpretative pathways, but none of them leads to a (meaningful) endpoint. It is this kind of interpretative withdrawal that turns Kafka’s literature into one of the areas most researched by literary critics. While scholars “make a run at” the narrative’s coherence and meaning, they are finally just “running through” the interpretative rhizome. The contradictions, for their part, are an extremely important device in this regard: it is they (and other techniques of inconsistency) who set the endless interpretative process into motion; they are entrances into the interpretative burrow. Contradictoriness should thus be acknowledged as a fundamental dimension of Kafka’s narrativity, but of course not only with regard to K.’s self-contradictions. As Engel (2013, 180), for example, has noted, “the information and the interpretations provided by other characters of the novel turn out to be highly contradictory as well” (translation mine). Indeed, it is a widely acknowledged fact that contradictions and related semantic phenomena (such as the paradox) are characteristic of Kafka’s narratives. For Alt (1985), whose analysis of Kafka’s poetics cannot be summarised in detail here,135 “indissoluble contradiction”136 (“unauflösliche[r] Widerspruch”) is one of the hallmarks of Kafka’s literature:

133 There is a German proverb that says that, “if one door is closed, another one opens” (expressing actually the consolatory idea that any loss or missed chance is counterbalanced by a new chance, which life offers in return). Slightly modified, this proverb could be used to describe the interpretative process triggered by Kafka’s narrativity (“if one door is closed, many others open”): while we may triumph in “closing” many “open doors” (i.e. solving contradictions) at once by interpreting K.’s various contradictions as an advantageous rhetorical strategy, our interpretation itself, in turn, opens various new “doors” – questions about K., the castle and their relationship. Neither of these “doors” (i.e. interpretative problems) can, in turn, be closed without posing new interpretative questions and alternatives. 134 I am alluding here, of course, to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988, 6) conceptualisation of the rhizome as a burrow. 135 Alt (1985) characterises Kafka’s poetics by the threefold characteristic of (i) double-layered scripture (“doppelte Schrift”), (ii) disruption (“Unterbrechung”) and (iii) the borderline (“Grenze”). 136 For Alt, Kafka’s narratives are characterised by an “undecided equilibrium between two assertions; what lacks is an indication of what is true and what is deceit” (“das unentschiedene

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Die Eingangsbehauptung wird im Gegenzug wieder aufgehoben, aber so, daß die Aufhebung selbst als Inszenierung eines Schriftsinns offenbar wird, damit alle möglichen Bedeutungen im Zusammenspiel ihrer Aussagen verfügbar bleiben. Der unauflösliche Widerspruch, die travestierte Synthese, das Zugleich kontrastierter Behauptungen sind mögliche Formen doppelter Schreibweise bei Kafka, die sich in fast allen Werken finden und den Schaffenswiderstand für ihre eigene Ausbreitung nutzbar machen wollen. (Alt 1985, 469–470)137

Alt (1985, 489) also highlights the contradictions that characterise the depiction of tonality throughout Kafka’s narrative oeuvre – from the mute, but simultaneously noisy dogs in Forschungen eines Hundes up to Josefine, the mouse, whose terrific, artful chant is nothing but a whistle. This “odd ambiguous representation of tone” (489, translation mine) relies obviously on the co-presence and competition of contradictory diegetic facts. Also for Camus, whose approach to Kafka will be presented in greater detail below,138 the “secret” of Kafka’s literature is related to a form of ambiguity139 that arises through contradictions.140 According to my analysis, which is consistent with these scholarly positions, Kafka employs contradictions systematically as a textual, narrative device, which can be found on various levels of textual structure. This hypothesis finds further support in the fact that the novel itself draws explicitly on the problem of contradictions, thereby establishing self-referentiality. K. reflects upon the contradictions that run through the first letter from the castle, thinking that they must be intended in their blatancy (“Das waren zweifellos Widersprüche, sie waren so sichtbar daß sie beabsichtigt sein mußten”, S, 41). K.’s comment is obviously also a valid (metonymical) comment on The Castle, that is on the novel as a whole, which contains the fictional letter from the castle as its

Gleichgewicht zwischen zwei Aussagen, ohne zu bestimmen, was wahr und was Täuschung sei”, Alt 1985, 469). 137 “The initial assertion is being reversed, but such that the reversal presents itself as an interpretation, thereby guaranteeing the availability of all the possible meanings that are engendered by the interplay of assertions. The indissoluble contradiction, the travestied synthesis, the simultaneity of contrary affirmations are possible forms of the double-layered scripture of Kafka, which can be found in almost all [of his] works and which make use of ‘resistance against creation’ in order to further their expansion” (translation mine). 138 See section 5.5. 139 As ambiguity seems to play a crucial role for narrativity, I elaborate on this subject in greater detail in chapter 4 (on Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses). 140 “C’est dans cette ambiguïté fondamentale que réside le secret de Kafka. [. . .] Ce sont ces paradoxes qu’il faut énumérer, ces contradictions qu’il faut renforcer, pour comprendre l’œuvre absurde” (Camus 1974, 172).

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part141: it is very improbable that the novel’s countless, blatant contradictions are an unintended by-product of Kafka’s storytelling. Kafka indeed provides highly contradictory information already on a very low level of narrative structure, for instance, within a short scene rendered in a few sentences: “Olga lachte auf. ‘Warum lachst Du?’ fragte K. ärgerlich. ‘Ich lache doch nicht’, sagte sie, lachte aber weiter”142 (S, 60). How could such a plain contradiction not be intentional? One of the main effects of such a contradiction is surely its function to open up various interpretative questions (and thus interpretative possibilities): Do K. and Olga have different concepts of ‘laughing’? Does Olga deny what she is really doing (and if so, why)? Or does K. somehow misinterpret Olga’s behaviour as laughter? Kafka creates contradictions even on a lower level of narrative structure, namely in short descriptions. The faces of the peasants, for example, are characterised both as “flat” and “bony” and as “round-cheeked” (“[. . .] Männer mit flachen knochigen und doch rundwangigen Gesichtern”, S, 59); and the face of the landlady is said to be “much furrowed”, albeit still “smooth” (“[. . .] ihr breites von vielen Altersfalten durchzogenes, aber [. . .] doch noch glattes [. . .] Gesicht”, S, 76). One could conclude from these observations that Kafka’s contradictions make it impossible for readers to create, while reading these sentences, a coherent image of the peasants’ and the landlady’s faces and that the diegetic reality is thereby withdrawn from readers. While I consider this conclusion to be correct, it should be noted that this is only half of the truth. 5.4.4 Withdrawal of contradictions: Conceptual drift A closer look at the last two examples reveals that Kafka avoids, at least in some cases, a direct, overly evident clash of contradictory terms. Indeed, as I will argue in this section, Kafka sometimes withdraws the very contradictions that he presents by a mechanism that one could call – in visible compliance with Neumann’s (1973) analysis of Kafka’s “sliding paradox” – conceptual drift.143

141 I will draw more extensively on the relationship between the castle and The Castle in section 5.4.8. 142 “Olga laughed out loud. ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked K. irritably. ‘I’m not laughing’, she protested, but went on laughing” (CA-M, 38). 143 I am illuminating the “enstranging” dimension of Kafka’s Castle in a forthcoming article (see Wagner forthcoming) in which I discuss two of the following examples of conceptual drift in greater detail.

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According to my analysis, Kafka’s conceptual drift relies on two devices: the establishment of a contradiction (i.e., the ascription of two semantically opposed, inconsistent terms to a diegetic element) and the conceptual relativisation or, more precisely, deterioration of this contradiction. I conceive of the second device as a strategy (or function) that Kafka realises by very different textual techniques (or forms). The notion of conceptual deterioration or relativisation should thus be understood as an umbrella term, susceptible of covering a broad diversity of techniques worth of in-depth analysis. While I cannot provide an exhaustive account of all of Kafka’s techniques of conceptual drift here, I would like to describe at least its central characteristics and, by way of example, three forms of conceptual deterioration, which could provisionally be summarised as (i) metonymical, (ii) ‘enstranging’ and (iii) relativising deterioration. The central characteristic of conceptual drift, as I conceive of it, consists of the fact that Kafka undermines a particular contradiction while establishing it, notably by creating an imbalance (or an asymmetry) between what appears initially as the symmetrical, well-balanced opposition of two antagonistic terms. (i) Metonymical deterioration. Es waren kleine, auf den ersten Blick einander sehr ähnliche Männer mit flachen knochigen und doch rundwangigen Gesichtern. (S, 59) Small men, at first glance they seemed quite alike, with their flat bony yet round-cheeked faces. (CA-H, 35)

Concerning the description of the peasants, there is no doubt that the adjective “round-cheeked” (“rundwangig”) contradicts the idea of “flat bony faces”. It should be noted, however, that the adjective “round-cheeked” contains (or rather: hides) the noun “cheek”, which stands in a metonymical relationship to the noun “face” (since it denotes a part of it). Kafka thereby invites readers to try to square the circle: they should imagine a “face” that is flat and bony and that integrates nonetheless the metonymic concept of “round cheeks”. From a cognito-linguistic point of view, Kafka can be said to use (hierarchical) metonymy to deteriorate the (heterarchical) contradiction insofar as the plainly contradictory, symmetrically opposed ideas of flatness and roundness are not simply ascribed to one and the same object, thus competing for validity; one of the two contradictory terms is ascribed to the “whole” (i.e. the face) while the other is ascribed to the “part” (i.e. the cheeks). The terms of the conceptual contradiction (flat versus round) are thus blended with two entities (face and cheeks) whose semantic relationship is metonymical. Kafka thereby projects a conceptual hierarchy (face > cheek) onto the respective, heterarchically opposed idea of flatness versus

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roundness (flat ↔ round). The contradiction itself thereby becomes problematic, deteriorated, insofar as its terms lose their symmetrical, antagonistic status. In other words, the contradiction drifts metonymically apart. (ii) Enstranging deterioration “Ich warte schon lange”, sagte sie und hob ihr breites von vielen Altersfalten durchzogenes, aber in seiner großen Masse doch noch glattes, vielleicht einmal schönes Gesicht. (S, 76) I’ve been waiting a long time”, she said, lifting her wide face, which was criss-crossed and lined with age, but for all its massiveness, it was still smooth and had perhaps once been beautiful. (CA-H, 46)

In the description of the landlady’s face, by contrast, the conceptual drift relies on another technique. First of all, it is important to note that her face is not only explicitly presented as both “much furrowed” and “smooth”, but that it is described, more precisely, as “still smooth” due to its “large mass” (“ihr breites von vielen Altersfalten durchzogenes, aber in seiner großen Masse doch noch glattes [. . .] Gesicht”, S, 76, emphasis mine). The idea of “smoothness”, which plainly contradicts the idea of being “much furrowed”, is deprived of its autonomy by what one could call, with a side glance to Shklovsky (2015), conceptual “enstrangement”144: the narrator suggests that the specific kind of smoothness in question is a matter of size (i.e. of the size of the landlady’s face). Readers are thus challenged to create à la minute a new, unfamiliar, “enstranged” concept of smoothness, which is not an independent, objectively verifiable quality of a surface any more, but a quality that somehow depends on (or correlates with) another feature of the landlady’s face, namely its “great mass”. Kafka thus sets readers the difficult task of imagining smoothness as a quality depending on size. As a consequence, the conventional idea of smoothness becomes “enstranged”; it slips away from the readers’ grasp and along with it the contradiction itself between the landlady’s “furrowed” versus “smooth” face.

144 I follow Berlina’s proposal to translate Shkovsky’s ostranenie as “enstrangement” (instead of “estrangement”, see Shklovsky 2015, 151–156). If I borrow Shklovsky’s term, it is not in order to insinuate that I use the concept exactly in the same way as Shklosvky did, but it is rather in order to draw attention to some central characteristics of Shklovsky’s ostranenie that play an important role for an understanding of Kafka’s literature as well: a cognitive renewal through deautomatisation, which correlates with an increase of complexity and a reduction of the speed of processing, reading and understanding. Shklovsky (2015, 163) himself points out that “[a]rt has different ways of deautomatizing things”; Kafka’s narratives are, in this regard, a rich source in which various techniques of deautomatisation (i.e. techniques that resist conventional cognito-linguistic processing) can be found. See Wagner (forthcoming).

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(iii) Relativising deterioration. A third kind of conceptual deterioration by which a contradiction is withdrawn can be found in a statement made by Olga, who reflects on the central dichotomy of the novel: the opposition between the village and the castle. Zwar heißt es, daß wir alle zum Schloß gehören und gar kein Abstand besteht und nichts zu überbrücken ist und das stimmt auch vielleicht für gewöhnlich, aber wir haben leider Gelegenheit gehabt, zu sehn, daß es gerade wenn es darauf ankommt, gar nicht stimmt.145 (S, 309) True, they say that all of us belong to the Castle and that there’s no distance between them and us, and that there’s nothing to bridge, and in general this may indeed be so, but unfortunately we had a chance to see that when everything is at stake it isn’t that way at all. (CA-H, 196)

Olga makes, in one and the same sentence, two contradictory claims: (i) that there is no difference between the village and the castle and (ii) that there is indeed an immense gap between them. Kafka avoids, however, the direct clash of these contradictory claims. He deteriorates the contradiction, but this time neither by metonymisation nor by conceptual enstrangement, but by the introduction of evaluative expressions, which span the whole range between (the initial) confirmation and (the final) negation of the claim of a congruence between castle and village. Initially, the claim of a congruence of castle and village is said to be true, although the “zwar” – “[o]f course” in W. and E. Muir’s translation (CA-M, 197), “[t]rue” in Harman’s translation (CA-H, 196) – at the very beginning already indicates the reservations that are to come. Then Olga relativises her judgment increasingly in a series of three adverbs, saying that it is “auch” [“actually” or, in Harman’s translation, “indeed”] “vielleicht” (“perhaps”, or “may [. . .] be” in Harman’s translation) and “für gewöhnlich” [“ordinarily” or, in Harman’s translation, “in general”] true. It should be noted that the transition from “vielleicht” to “für gewöhnlich” is a transition from an abstract, ontological doubt or insecurity to a temporal restriction (it is “not always” true, but in most cases). Olga then concretises her judgment according to which the initial claim is “ordinarily” true as she states that there are times – “when everything is at stake” (“gerade wenn es darauf ankommt”) – during which the claim is not true at all. The syntactic construction thereby relativises

145 “Of course, we’re all supposed to belong to the Castle, and there’s supposed to be no gulf between us, and nothing to be bridged over, and that may be true enough on ordinary occasions, but we’ve had grim evidence that it’s not true when anything really important pops up” (CA-M, 197). Since W. and E. Muir’s translation is not precise enough to convey my ideas, in the following passage I will translate important key words on my own.

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the idea of an absolute, transtemporal truth, still affirmed (in terms of a castlevillage continuum or identity) at the beginning of the sentence. Truth is being smoothly transformed into a question of temporally situated facts, that is, into a question of empirical evidence. All in all, Kafka deteriorates the contradiction between the claim’s truthfulness (in the beginning of the sentence) and its falseness (at the end of the sentence) by linking it to three further dimensions, which somehow relativise the entire contradiction: (i) the judgmental stance of the speaker (something true according to Olga), which relativises the idea of objectivity inherent in the opposition, (ii) a subversion of the opposition between truth versus falseness: something that is “perhaps” true is situated in the conceptual interstice between truth and falseness; (ii) time or, respectively, empirical evidence (something being “ordinarily” true – but not in one hundred per cent of the cases). What all three techniques of conceptual deterioration considered above have in common is the introduction of additional (conceptual, semantic, etc.) structures or parameters, which are originally not part of the respective contradiction. Hierarchical metonymical structures are not part of the contradictory opposition between flatness and roundness; the parameter of size is not part of the contradiction between roundness and flatness; and subjectivity, threevalued logic and time are per se not part of the truth-dependent contradiction according to which the village and the castle are both separated and united entities. In each of these examples, Kafka links additional parameters to (at least one of) the two contradictory terms, thereby depriving the contradiction of its dichotomic clarity. Kafka creates, in a way, conceptual rhizomes inasmuch as he interconnects conceptual contents and structures in new, “defamiliarising” (Shklovksy) or “deterritorialising” (Deleuze and Guattari) ways; he thereby increases the conceptual complexity of the sentences. Kafka prevents readers from processing the respective contradictions as contradictions since the added parameters relativise and therefore withdraw the contradictoriness. The text insinuates that the two terms of the contradictions can be made compatible if one integrates the new parameters into the picture. In other words, readers are not entitled to read the contradictions as contradictions before they have not squared the circle: e.g., integrated a sizerelated idea of smoothness into the image of the landlady’s “much furrowed” face or conciliated the heterarchical opposition of flatness and roundness with a metonymical conceptual structure. This “before” is the marker of both a textual device, which paradoxically deteriorates (and thereby withdraws) the very contradictions at the same time as it imposes them, and an interpretative detour, which readers are (implicitly) told to take. As a conclusion, I would like to highlight that contradictions are already a textual device on their own, which creates coherence in progress insofar as they

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prevent the creation of a well-formed, consistent (micro- or macro-)schema. For Kafka, however, contradictions are apparently neither disturbing nor complex enough; this is why he deteriorates even the contradictions themselves. It is this pursued, two-step conceptual deterioration that makes his narrativity a dynamics of withdrawal. On the one hand, the contradictions themselves rock the expectations of readers, withdraw consistency from them and both frustrate and stimulate their search for coherence. On the other hand, the contradictions themselves become distorted and thus recede further into difficult or unknown conceptual territory, calling readers, again, to follow them deeper and deeper into Kafka’s interpretative burrow. In my understanding, it is this alluring call, i.e. this withdrawal of coherence that produces what Adorno calls the “maelstrom force of his [Kafka’s] work” (1967, 245).

5.4.5 Emerging feelings of reception: The “Kafkaesque” experience One may differ in opinion as to whether the conceptual tasks that arise with conceptual drift can be successfully accomplished at all. As my wording (according to which readers have to “try to square the circle”) suggests, I, for my part, rather deny it. But this question is not the essential point. What is much more important is that Kafka creates such difficult tasks already on a very low level of narrative structure, sometimes within a few words. If readers wanted to deal consciously with all of these inconsistencies, they would have to invest years in reading the novel, stopping at every contradiction or difficulty of comprehension in almost every sentence. In this regard, Kafka’s narratives are a brilliant example of “enstranging” literature in Shklovsky’s sense since Kafka’s “difficult, laborious language[. . .] puts the brakes on perception” (Shklovsky 2015, 171) – or, more precisely, on narrative processing. The novel corresponds thus well to Shklovsky’s definition of poetry “as decelerated, distorted speech” (172) (see Wagner forthcoming). Most readers, however, especially non-professional ones, will not be willing to spend years reading a novel. As a consequence, they are more or less constrained not to follow the conceptual instructions of the text, not to make the required interpretative detours and not to meet the concept-related challenges with which Kafka confronts them. But understanding, then, necessarily fails already at a very basic level of structure. As a consequence, readers accustom themselves to deficient comprehension. They (have to) read over both the contradictions and their withdrawal. Interestingly, Kafka’s narrative withdrawal has therefore a recursive (or self-performative) dimension: it withdraws not only conceptual consistency from readers, but also withdraws itself insofar as it is

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designed to escape the readers’ attention. Readers are constrained to feel, in the descriptions analysed above, that there is something strange about how things or people (e.g. the peasants and the landlady) are described; they will, for instance, probably experience difficulty in imagining the characters through Kafka’s description. But most readers will simultaneously not be able to pin down the problem because the contradictoriness is concealed by conceptual modifications whose imperative challenges cannot be met during fluent reading. As Thorlby puts it: “We have no idea what it is we fail to get” (1987, 37). In the upshot, the dynamics of withdrawal thus manifests itself in (textual structures and in corresponding cognitive responses that produce) a failure of understanding. While this failure can be felt and recognised by readers, the dynamics of withdrawal itself hides behind the Kafkaesque feeling of not-understanding, of being-lost, which it produces. I thus contend that it is conceptual withdrawal that contributes significantly to the “Kafkaesque” feelings that readers experience as they follow Kafka’s narrative paths: it is highly discomforting not only not to understand, but not to understand one’s own non-understanding. Briefly, one becomes completely lost in Kafka’s conceptual burrow or, as Miller puts it, in the “vertiginous ocean of uninterpreted detail” (1991, 136). Miller also accurately describes feelings of “[d]isorientation, [. . .] vertigo, [and] frustration”, which “magnify” the readers’ “unfulfilled yearning for certainty” (1991, 139). Nonetheless, from my point of view, these feeling of disorientation and frustration are not only an effect of the ambiguous perspective structure of the text, that is, of the “claustrophobia” (Miller 1991, 136, 139) created by the readers’ entrapment in K.’s perspective, as Miller argues, but they are an effect of conceptual withdrawal. The problem resides not only in the fact that “[t]he reader (like K.?) is thrown back on her own devices, to interpret with no guidance at all from any higher authority” (139), but that Kafka disables the creation of resultative coherence systematically, maintaining readers in the stage of narrativity in actualisation. One cannot but recognise the (performative) parallel that Kafka creates, in this regard, between his protagonist and his reader(s): the two are very focussed on making progress (K. on his way to the castle, the reader on her/his way through the novel) and the two fail to achieve their respective goals because the structures that they encounter (the unwritten rules of the castle; techniques of withdrawal) are designed to thwart their progress. Many readers will again not understand, but feel that there is a parallel between themselves and the protagonist. This is another crucial dimension of the “Kafkaesque” (as a reading experience): readers intuit that their conceptual discomfort, their efforts and failures

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are somehow reflected by the experiences of K., but they cannot clear up this mystery; it remains an intuitive impression. Contradictions and their withdrawal are, however, only one way of entering Kafka’s conceptual-interpretative rhizomes. The technique of inversion works against the creation of coherence as well.

5.4.6 Inversions Other scholars have already observed that inversions play a role in Kafka’s literature. Neumann (1973, 463), for instance, considers inversion (“Umkehrung”) to be a constitutive element of the paradox, which, for its part, is an important device used by Kafka. In my view, even outside of the paradox proper, inversion plays an important role, being an autonomous textual-narrative technique. This technique is close to the strategies of both contradiction and of reframing (see below).146 Despite these overlaps, there are forms of inversion that do not merge in one of the other techniques, such that it can be said to constitute a technique in its own right. The following passage can be considered a classical (but simple) example of inversion: Immer erwartete K., daß nun endlich die Straße zum Schloß einlenken müsse, und nur weil er es erwartete, ging er weiter; offenbar infolge seiner Müdigkeit zögerte er die Straße zu verlassen [. . .] – endlich riß er sich los von dieser festhaltenden Straße [. . .]. (S, 21)147

What is inverted in this passage are the roles of agent and patient. Initially, K. is tenaciously trying to reach the castle by foot; the road, however, fails to bring him nearer to the castle. It is thus K. who does not want to leave the road, in the desperate hope that the road will finally lead him to his final destination. At the end of the passage, however, the relationship between K. and the route is inverted. It is not K. any more who holds on to the road, but it is the “clinging 146 On the one hand, it is close to contradiction, insofar as one and the same diegetic element is presented in two strictly opposed ways; on the other hand, it is close to reframing insofar as the inverted presentation of something can amount to providing it with new interpretative meaning. 147 “At every turn, K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only because of this expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwillingly, tired as he was, to leave the street [. . .] – but at least he tore himself away from the obsession of the street [. . .]” (CA-M, 12). The translation of “festhaltende Straße” as “the obsession of the street” is problematic and not precise enough, since it conceals the very mechanism of inversion that is at stake here. Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation tends here to normalise difficult, deviant elements of Kafka’s prose, which are, however, fundamental for an understanding of Kafka’s narrativity. Harman provides a more finegrained translation: “finally, he tore himself away from this clinging street” (CA-H, 10).

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road” ( festhaltende Straße) that holds on to him. The narrator thus ascribes agentivity to the road, blaming it implicitly for K.’s long-lasting attempt to find his way to the castle. K., by contrast, is presented such that he has to overcome an allegedly passive status. According to the inverted perspective on the event, K. has obviously been caught by the “clinging road”, such that he finally has to “tear himself away” from it (“endlich riß er sich los”), thereby reconquering his allegedly lost agentivity. Another inversion can be seen in the presentation of the peasants who behave like cattle. During K.’s first stay at the Herrenhof, the yells that they emit are “hungrig röchelnd” (S, 64; literal translation: “rattling hungrily”). Frieda recounts that they “always come bursting in like cattle into their stalls” (CA-M, 41). She continues as follows: ‘[. . .] Aber nun sollen sie wirklich in den Stall, in den sie gehören. Wären Sie nicht da, würde ich die Tür hier aufreißen und Klamm selbst müßte sie hinaustreiben. [. . .] Nun werde ich sie selbst hinaustreiben müssen.’ Sie nahm eine Peitsche aus der Ecke [. . .] (S, 65–66)148

Later on, the narrator refers to them even as “wildgeworden[e] Bauern” (S, 66; “feral peasants”). What is inverted in this example are the roles of the peasants and their cattle. The peasants assume the attributes of their animals inasmuch as they behave collectively and obviously only according to their basic instincts. Moreover, they have to be dominated (or dompted) and “driven out” (“Klamm selbst müßte sie hinaustreiben”) – to the stalls. Instead of possessing cattle, the peasants themselves seem to be “possessed” by the animals’ spirit. A subtler, more twisted form of inversion can be found in the following passage from the episode in which K. awaits Klamm in the inner courtyard: Das Warten [auf Klamm, ESW] dauerte länger als K. gedacht hatte. [. . .] ‘Das kann noch lange dauern’, sagte plötzlich eine rauhe Stimme [. . .].‘Was kann denn lange dauern?’ fragte K. [. . .] ‘Ehe Sie weggehn werden’, sagte der Kutscher. K. verstand ihn nicht, fragte aber nicht weiter, er glaubte auf diese Weise den Hochmütigen am besten zum Reden zu bringen. (S, 162)149

The coachman’s answer is an inversion of the expected answer. The context (K.’s waiting for Klamm) suggests that the coachman’s comment (“Das kann 148 “‘[. . .] But now they’ve really got to get into the stalls, where they belong. If you weren’t here [. . .] Klamm would be forced to drive them out himself [. . .] But now I’ll have to turn them out myself.’ She took a whip from the corner [. . .]” (CA-M, 41). 149 “The wait lasted longer than K. had expected. [. . .] ‘It might be a long time yet,’ yet said a rough voice suddenly [. . .]. What might be a long time yet?’ asked K. [. . .] ‘Before you go away’, said the coachman. K. did not understand him, but did not ask further; he thought that would be the best means of making the insolent fellow speak” (CA-M, 104).

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noch lange dauern”) refers to Klamm’s arrival: it can take a long time until Klamm arrives. The actual answer (“Ehe Sie weggehn” [“Before you go away”]) inverts the roles of the one who is waiting and the one who is awaited and the corresponding activities of arriving and leaving. This surprising inversion could explain why K. “did not understand him”. Interestingly, while K.’s lack of comprehension can trigger readers who share K.’s confusion to sympathise or identify with K., the impression of complicity is not long-lasting since K.’s immediate reaction is governed by the same logic of inversion. While questions are conventionally considered to be an adequate means to get an information, K. thinks that the best way to obtain more information is to pose no questions at all.150 Indeed, the text is scattered with inversions. Consider, for instance, Olga’s explanations on the relationship between the officials and the women from the village (“Das Verhältnis der Frauen zu den Beamten ist, glaube mir, sehr schwer oder vielmehr sehr leicht zu beurteilen”,151 S, 310) or on Amalia’s feelings for Sortini (“Nun ja, sie hat ihn nicht geliebt, aber vielleicht hat sie ihn doch geliebt [. . .]”,152 S, 310). Moreover, central narrative facts become inverted. While it first seems as if Frieda leaves Klamm for K., Frieda later inverts this diegetic fact, suggesting, during K.’s first conversation with the landlady, that it is Klamm who has left her (see S, 87) – a plain inversion of the original state of affairs. Insofar as inversion confronts two radically opposed possibilities of evaluating or conceptualising things, it is structurally akin to another, more general technique used by Kafka: his play with dichotomies.

5.4.7 Play with dichotomies In this section, I would like to explore how Kafka plays with three global dichotomic patterns in the novel. Insofar as dichotomies and oppositions allow readers to structure the world and to establish order, playing with these dichotomies (i.e. ways of hovering and switching between them) can be understood

150 Did K. notice the coachman’s logic of inversion? Does he perhaps try to enable successful communication with the coachman by imitating his inverted thinking? If one assumes that the passage on the road, analysed at the beginning of this subchapter, reveals K.’s viewpoint, then this hypothesis is rather improbable, since K. can then be said to show from early on a tendency towards inverted thinking – a way of thinking that allows him to project unwelcome feelings onto his environment (e.g. onto the “the clinging street”). 151 “Believe me, the relationship between women and officials is very difficult, or rather always very easy, to determine” (CA-H, 196). 152 “All right, so she didn’t love him, but then again perhaps she did love him [. . .]” (CA-H, 197).

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as a device by which Kafka disturbs the readers’ construction of an ordered world, thereby keeping them on the stage of narrativity in actualisation. I will examine three macro-structural oppositions: (i) semblance versus truth; (ii) play (or fun) versus seriousness; and (iii) aboveness (or the castle) versus belowness (or the village). (i) Semblance versus truth. As it has often been stated, Kafka’s prose is teeming with expressions that put the diegetic reality depicted in parenthesis.153 Expressions such as “angeblich” [allegedly], “scheinbar” [seemingly], “wahrscheinlich” [probably] or “[es] schien” [it seemed], which are abundant throughout Kafka’s oeuvre, pose the question of whether something is the case or whether it only seems to be so. It is also in this regard that the novel fails to comply with Prince’s idea of narrative as an entity that “dies from sustained ignorance and indecision” (1982, 149). One of the cornerstones of the plot is surely the fact that Frieda leaves Klamm for K. Much later, however, Pepi casts a doubt on this truth, but not in same way as Frieda does (when she inverts the facts, see section 5.4.6). Pepi talks about Frieda’s “alleged affair with Klamm” (CA-M, 293; “ihr angebliches Verhältnis zu Klamm”, S, 454), thereby shaking the conviction that Frieda and Klamm had a relationship at all. She also questions K.’s love for Frieda by presenting several interpretative alternatives: “is it possible that K. really loves Frieda,154 isn’t he deceiving himself or is he perhaps deceiving only Frieda” (CA-M, 293; “ist es möglich, daß K. wirklich Frieda liebt, täuscht er sich nicht oder täuscht er vielleicht gar nur Frieda”, S, 454). Instead of interpreting Pepi’s thoughts as her own wishes and feelings, I would like to highlight the fact that Pepi questions the correspondence between semblance and truth in terms of hidden motives and intentions. In her eyes, there is no one-to-one correspondence between semblance and truth. Instead, they are separated by a huge gap, which leaves much space for interpretation. It is this general insight into the incommensurability of semblance and truth, into the gap between happenings and the various ways in which these happening could be conceptualised and interpreted, which is illustrated by the whole story and experienced as interpretative difficulties by the reader.

153 See, e.g. Cohn (1968, 36–38); Kobs (1970, 9–10). In German one would call this the act of putting the diegetic reality in “Klammern” (parentheses); this wording establishes a connection between the character Klamm and Kafka’s narrative style. 154 Considering the emphasis that the German original puts syntactically on Frieda, by putting the adverb “wirklich” (really) directly before Frieda, a better translation could be: “is it possible that it is really Frieda that K. loves [. . .].”

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While Pepi’s explanations create uncertainty as to what is true and what only seems to be true, Olga, for her part, deconstructs in a way the dichotomy as such. Nun, sagte ich mir, wenn die allgemeine Meinung, sei es auch nur scheinbar, nur von der Botenbeleidigung weiß, ließe sich, sei es auch wieder nur scheinbar, alles wieder gutma(S, 346) chen, wenn man den Boten versöhnen könnte.155

As she tells the story about her father, she does not even try to bridge the gap between semblance and truth (as she could, for instance, by presenting her own interpretation), since, in her narration, she contents herself with pure semblance, reflecting on what are, from the point of view of the villagers, the “apparent” reasons for the father’s guilt. She even searches for strategies that could help her father on this level of semblance. She thereby subverts the idea of semblance itself, since “scheinbare” (“ostensible” or apparent) actions (i.e., actions carried out on the level of semblance) are obviously considered to have potentially the same impact upon ostensible reality as “real”, true actions would have upon “reality”: To conclude, either the text constructs uncertainties as to whether something is truly or only seemingly the case in the diegetic world, thereby infringing the law of narrative certainty and factuality, or the text thwarts the application of the dichotomy as such, by an illogical emancipation of the pole of semblance, which can actually not be processed without its conceptual counterpart (truth). (ii) Play (or fun) versus seriousness The story’s hovering between play156 (or fun) and seriousness further contributes to keeping the reader in the stage of narrativity in actualisation. This dichotomy can be understood as a variant of the opposition of semblance and reality insofar as theatrical play produces a semblance. Both play and semblance are thus opposed to serious, true reality. There is however a crucial difference between the two oppositions. Semblance, as I refer to it under (i.), designates that which resists K.’s (and other characters’) understanding of village and castle. It covers all the diegetic facts (seen, told or experienced) that do not allow a coherent image of the world to be created. In other words, the world of semblance with which K. is confronted does not allow K. to grasp the rules, truths or mechanisms that “truly” govern the village-castle sphere. Instead, it triggers the search for it. This search, however, can be (and has been) understood as an important, serious, 155 “Well, I said to myself, if people in general know only of the insult to the messenger, even if only seemingly so, then it would be possible, again even if only seemingly so, to make amends for everything if we succeeded in appeasing the messenger” (CA-H, 220). 156 See also Schuster’s (2012, 369–414) considerations on that subject.

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veritable goal; something important is at stake in K.’s attempts to reach and understand the castle. If so, the semblance-versus-reality dichotomy is not a neutral fact – it is marked by what my second dichotomy calls seriousness: something is really at stake, triggering serious problem-solving activities. This serious mode of accessing the world has, however, a counterpart in the diegetic world in the form of play and/or fun. It should be noted that a playful, fun-based approach to the diegetic world has a disruptive, devaluating effect on the entire semblance-truth dichotomy, since the project to break through the canvas of semblance to the truth behind it is a serious undertaking. If this seriousness itself is undermined by fun and playfulness, the semblance-reality opposition loses its pertinence. Already the first chapter brings up the idea of theatrical play as Schwarzer is described as having “the face of an actor” (CA-M, 3). A bit later, when Schwarzer asks K. loudly to quit the count’s territory, K. answers: “Genug der Komödie” (S, 9; “Enough of this comedy”, CA-H, 3).157 Later again, while Schwarzer makes a phone call in order to ask whether anyone is awaiting K. as the castle’s land surveyor, K. reflects upon his strategy, thinking that it makes no sense to continue “playing” the sleeping man (“Dann hatte es freilich aber auch keinen Sinn den Schlafenden zu spielen”, S, 10). Campbell (1986, 389) is thus right when she describes K.’s behaviour as “bizarre improvisational move[s]”: already the first chapter introduces the isotopy of theatre, making both K. and his interlocutors appear as actors in an improvised play. The novel provides further clues that establish a connection either to theatrical play or to comedy and its typical goals and effects: fun and laughter. One of these clues is the characters’ exaggerated behaviour, which appears as a kind of over-acting (e.g. the animal-like behaviour of the peasants; the silly, exaggerated behaviour of Artur and Jeremias). The idea of comedy is sometimes explicitly invoked in these contexts, transforming the narration into a theatrical scene: Hinter ihm waren die Bauern schon ganz nah an ihn herangerückt. Die Gehilfen waren mit vielen Seitenblicken nach ihm damit beschäftigt, die Bauern von ihm abzuhalten. Es schien aber nur Komödie zu sein, auch gaben die Bauern, von dem Ergebnis des Gespräches befriedigt, langsam nach. (S, 38)158

157 Willa and Edwin Muir translate this sentence, less precisely, as “Enough of this fooling” (CA-M, 4), which somehow conceals Kafka’s allusion to literary or theatrical play. 158 “Behind him, the peasants had crowded quite close. His assistants, with many side glances in his direction, were trying to keep them back. But [it seemed to be nothing but comedy, ESW], and in any case the peasants, satisfied with the result of the conversation, were beginning to give ground” (CA-M, 23; my translation in the parenthesis, because Willa and Edwin Muir have not translated the idea of comedy literally).

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Barnabas is presented, in Olga’s narrative, as an actor as well159; and also the assistants seem to play a role. Galater has sent them to “cheer him [K.] up” (CA-M, 234) – which is undoubtedly a classical function of comedy. Moreover, Jeremias tells K. that he and Artur are submitting a complaint about K. The accusation: K. cannot understand a joke (“‘Darüber’, sagte Jeremias, ‘daß Du keinen Spaß verstehst [. . .]’”, S, 367). But have the assistants been sent by the castle? Instead of answering this question seriously, Frieda prefers to play with it: “Abgesandte Klamms, ich nenne sie in meinen Gedanken im Spiele so, aber vielleicht sind sie es wirklich”160 (S, 219). As a last example, consider the episode in which the teacher renders a conversation with the Superintendent. During this conversation, the Superintendent attempts to convince the teacher to offer K. a job. The teacher has the better arguments, but finally he has to acquiesce – not because of an extraordinarily good argument put forward by his interlocutor, but because of a joke; and “against a joke there’s no argument” (CA-M, 94; “gegen Späße gibt es keine Einwände”, S, 146). Arguments, reasoning, logical thinking – all of these aspects lose their power in a world in which fun and play prevail, at least from time to time. (iii) Aboveness (or the castle) versus belowness (or the village) The contrast between the castle high above and the village is the central dichotomy of the whole novel and many scholars have pointed to the ways in which this dichotomy is both constructed and deconstructed by the novel, beginning with the second sentence: Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehn, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor. (S, 7)161

The incipit affirms the presence of the castle by referring to the “Schloßberg” (castle hill) and to “das große Schloß” (the large castle); but it erases the castle 159 “Barnabas ist durch die zwei Briefe wieder ein glückliches Kind geworden, trotz allen Zweifeln, die er an seiner Tätigkeit hat. Diese Zweifel hat er nur für sich und mich, Dir gegenüber aber sucht er seine Ehre darin, als wirklicher Bote aufzutreten, so wie seiner Vorstellung nach wirkliche Boten auftreten” (S, 361). 160 “Klamm’s emissaries, that’s what I call them in my thoughts, just playfully, but perhaps that is what they really are” (CA-H, 139). 161 “The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness” (CA-H, 1).

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in the same breath, stating that it is invisible and that nothing outlined it. Interestingly, the two reasons offered for the castle’s invisibility – mist and darkness – cannot both be responsible for this invisibility, simply because they rely on contradictory conditions. Mist takes its full effect only in the presence of light, but darkness is the complete absence of light. The focaliser should thus not only be unable to perceive the castle, but also to perceive the mist on the hill – either this, or the focaliser is wrong in claiming complete darkness. Readers, for their part, are thus, already at this point, required to square the circle: they should imagine a castle that is invisible and imagine mist in complete (!) darkness162 – neither the moon nor the stars can help here, since there is, as the narrator emphasises, “not even the slightest glimmer of light”. The text thus instructs readers to imagine nothing but black darkness. But by activating concepts such as LIGHT, MIST, HILL and CASTLE, the text seduces readers to imagine anything but darkness. We recognise in this textual device the doublebind structure, mentioned above, which is typical for Kafka. Visible or not, the castle hill is being introduced in the first sentence, creating the central dichotomic structure of the novel, which opposes the castle, to which K. “gazes above”, to the village at the foot of the hill, whose description via “deep” snow serves to strengthen the hoch-tief [high-deep] and oben-unten [above-below] dichotomy. This topological contrast is enriched, throughout the novel, by the way the characters speak about the castle163 and its officials, especially Klamm.164 In K.’s first conversation with the landlady, the lady compares

162 This passage thus exemplies a technique that Lehmann describes as a “withdrawal of reference”: “Kafkas Schreiben gehorcht einem Gesetz, das man als Entzug der Referenz begreifen muß. Der Text macht sich einen Spaß daraus (der zugleich Verzweiflung ist), einen von den Buchstaben evozierten Gegenstand nicht etwa darzustellen, sondern im Fortschreiten der Sätze zu demontieren. Auf diese Weise konzentriert Kafkas Text alle Energie und Aufmerksamkeit auf die Sprachbewegung, die diesen Abbau und diesen Entzug der Referenz bewerkstelligt” (Lehmann 2006, 88, orig. emphasis). 163 For instance, K. designates the castle officials as “die Herren oben” (S, 42; “the gentlemen above”). K. also has the impression that Barnabas, whom K. initially considers to be an important connection to the castle, looks down to him, although Barnabas is simultaneously said to have the same body seize as K.: “Barnabas war etwa so groß wie K., trotzdem schien sein Blick sich zu K. zu senken, aber fast demütig geschah das [. . .]” (S, 46). The technique of contradiction comes into play here as well. If Barnabas has K.’s height, it is logically impossible, at least on a physical level, that he looks down to K. One could argue that K. alludes to the semantic implications of the verb “auf jemanden herabsehen” (“to look down on somebody”), according to which someone has or expresses a feeling of superiority. This reading, however, is explicitly contradicted by the text as well since Barnabas is said to look “almost humbly” (“fast demütig”) down on him. 164 See Wagner (2011, 3, note 16).

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Klamm to an eagle and K. to a blind worm165; K. later adopts and enriches the eagle metaphor.166 Later, in K.’s second conversation with the landlady, she depicts Klamm’s potential answer as coming from somewhere above: [. . .] wenn ich durch meine Verbindung es erreiche, daß Ihre Bitte um Unterredung zu Klamm geleitet wird, versprechen Sie mir bis zum Herabkommen der Antwort nichts auf eigene Faust zu unternehmen. (S, 138, emphasis mine)167

The difference between castle and village, above and below, is, however, constantly undermined. According to Schwarzer, the “village belongs to the Castle, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so in a manner of speaking in the Castle itself” (CA-M, 3); and as K. gazes, in daylight, at the castle, he finds that if he “had not known that it was a castle he might have taken it for a little town” (CA-M, 10), since “it was after all only wretched-looking town, a huddle of village houses” whose “stone seemed to be crumbling away” (CA-M, 10). It is thus his expectation – a schema working top-down – that makes him interpret the houses above as a castle and that makes him perhaps stare at the invisible castle at the very beginning of the story. As I have argued elsewhere, it should be noted that there is actually no difference between the castle understood as (i) a location, (ii) an institution and (iii) a word: K.’s spatial search for the castle coincides with his effort to create a coherent concept of the institution of the castle, which, for its part, is based on the stories that villagers tell about the castle.168 If K. fails to access the castle, topologically, it is because he fails to create a coherent concept of the castle because he cannot synthesise the diverse tales told about the castle into a consistent schema.

165 “Sie werden dann z.B. sofort gerechter gegen mich werden und zu ahnen beginnen, was für einen Schrecken ich durchgemacht habe [. . .] als ich erkannt habe, daß meine liebste kleine gewissermaßen den Adler verlassen hat um sich der Blindschleiche zu verbinden [. . .]” (S, 90). 166 “Klamm war fern, einmal hatte die Wirtin Klamm mit einem Adler verglichen und das war K. lächerlich erschienen, jetzt aber nicht mehr, er dachte an seine Ferne, an seine uneinnehmbare Wohnung, an seine, nur vielleicht von Schreien, wie sie K. noch nie gehört hatte, unterbrochene Stummheit, an seinen herabdringenden Blick, der sich niemals nachweisen, niemals widerlegen ließ, an seine von K.’s Tiefe her unzerstörbaren Kreise, die er oben nach unverständlichen Gesetzen zog, nur für Augenblicke sichtbar – das alles war Klamm und dem Adler gemeinsam” (S, 183–184). 167 “[. . .] if by using my influence I can manage to get your request for an interview passed on Klamm, promise me to do nothing on your own account until the reply comes [down]” (CA-M, 88, emphasis mine). I have modified Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation (by replacing the verb “to come back” by “to come down”) since their translation normalises the extraordinary choice of words (“herabkommen”), which emphasises indeed the central dichotomy of aboveness, associated with the castle, versus belowness, linked to the village. 168 For a more detailed argument on this subject, see Wagner (2011).

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5.4.8 Metaleptic language use: The relationship between the castle and The Castle The last dichotomy under consideration brings us back to the question that has perhaps been most discussed by scholars: What is the castle or what does it stand for? Which interpretation of the castle would be able to clear up the mystery, for instance, of Schwarzer’s comment according to which “whoever lives here or passes the night here [i.e., in the village, ESW] does so in a manner of speaking in the Castle itself” (CA-M, 3)? In this section I would like to offer a reading according to which the fictive characters of the novel do at least sometimes refer, when they speak about “the castle”, to the novel (The Castle) in which they live. This would amount to metaleptical language use by the characters. While I do not think that this interpretation in terms of metalepsis explains all the mysteries related to the diegetic castle and the people connected to it (Klamm, the officials, etc.), it may be helpful in clarifying at least some of the absurdities and paradoxes of the plot. Schwarzer’s comment quoted above, for instance, makes perfect sense if one reads his reference to the castle as a reference to the novel. The village and the villagers form part of The Castle. This metaleptic reading also allows us to understand why K. cannot reach “the castle”: the fictive reality of the village and its inhabitants depends ontologically completely on the author and his writing process. This level of scripture has thus a higher ontological status than the villagers. Considered from this perspective, it is, in a way, a necessity that K. cannot see or reach The Castle: he is a part of it, and a (hierarchically embedded) part can never become one with the (hierarchically embedding) whole (except, of course, in cases of metaleptical transgressions through which the characters could leave their diegetic universe). Reading “the castle” as The Castle also provides the decision of the castle to “recognise[] him [K.] as the Land Surveyor” (CA-M, 6) with new meaning. Kafka has decided to pick up K.’s improvised assertion. By way of metonymy, it is the novel, in the process of being created by Kafka, which can be said to have decided to recognise K. as the Land Surveyor, perhaps in order to propel its own plot. One could argue, however, that this makes little sense insofar as Kafka has also invented K. and his improvised assertion. Would my hypothesis then not amount to considering the novel as a self-entertaining dialogue that Kafka leads with himself, or, more precisely, with his fictive alter ego (and with the other characters)? Yes, it would. Such a hypothesis, presented e.g. by

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Fromm (2010, 303),169 should however not be rejected prematurely. Not only does the name of the protagonist, K., suggest a connection between him and his creator. In his diary (from the 27th January of 1922, just before he started to write The Castle, see Engel 2013, 179), Kafka has also expressed his wish to reach, through the process of writing, a “higher” kind of observation by which he would be able to jump out of “the murderer’s row” of deed-observation: Merkwürdiger, geheimnisvoller, vielleicht gefährlicher, vielleicht erlösender Trost des Schreibens: das Hinausspringen aus der Totschlägerreihe Tat – Beobachtung, Tat – Beobachtung, indem eine höhere Art des Beobachtung geschaffen wird, eine höhere, keine schärfere, und je höher sie ist, je unerreichbarer von der “Reihe” aus, desto unabhängiger wird sie, desto mehr eigenen Gesetzen der Bewegung folgend, desto unberechenbarer, freudiger, stetiger ihr Weg. (T, 892)170

The world depicted in Das Schloss is a succession of deeds and of their observation and Kafka may have found relief in creating such worlds from his “higher”, unreachable, authorial position. It is possible that the dichotomy of the village below and The Castle above mirrors this idea and undergirds my metaleptic reading of “the castle” as The Castle. Some mysterious statements by other characters could gain new meaning through this reading as well. The landlady, for instance, makes a surprising claim in her first conversation with K.: “Sie sind ja gar nicht imstande Klamm wirklich zu sehn, das ist nicht Überhebung meinerseits, denn ich selbst bin es auch nicht imstande” (S, 80).171 This statement appears almost absurd if one thinks of the castle and its officials merely as fictive entities, which inhabit the same world as K. and the landlady. But her statement appears less absurd if

169 Fromm draws on the fact that Kafka felt embarrassed when, in 1922, he handed out the second Quartheft to Brod since, as Kafka wrote in a letter to Brod, the text had been designed to be written, not to be read. If one takes this intention seriously, Fromm explains, Kafka did not think about readers while he wrote Das Schloss. The novelistic fragment would then have to be understood as a kind of “self-address” (“eine Art der Selbstansprache”, 2010, 303). 170 “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of [the] murderer’s row [of act-observation, act-observation by means of the creation of] a higher type of observation, a higher, not a keener type, and the higher it is and the less within each reach of the ‘row’, the more independent it becomes, the more obedient to its own laws of motion, the more incalculable, the more joyful, the more ascendant its course” (D2, 212; my modifications of Greenberg’s translation in square brackets, ESW). 171 “You’re not even capable of seeing Klamm as he really is, that’s not merely an exaggeration, for I myself am not capable of it either” (CA-M, 51). It should be noted, however, that, in German the adverb “really” does not refer to Klamm, but to the act of seeing (“You’re not capable of really seeing Klamm”). I would also replace “exaggeration” by “hubris” (or “arrogance”) and discard the adverb “merely”, which has been freely added by Willa and Edwin Muir.

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one reads this sentence in terms of metalepsis. Strictly speaking, it is true that K. cannot “see” Klamm (or anything else), because fictive characters are, in Roland Barthes’s (1966, 19) terms, “des êtres de papier” [paper beings]. Considered from this perspective, the landlady’s metaleptical language use would reveal that she is aware of what she is: a fictive being, unable to ever reach the higher level of The Castle because she is a part of it.172 Besides metaleptical language use, there are other kinds of linguistic deviances by which the fictive characters contribute to the withdrawal of consistency, for example Bürgel’s “countermanding speech acts”.

5.4.9 Countermanding speech-acts: The Bürgel episode Kellerwessel (1991) offers a language-philosophical analysis of Das Schloss. An important episode in the novel is K.’s encounter with Bürgel who holds a strange monologue. According to Kellerwessel, the central device by which this strangeness is being produced is Bürgel’s extensive use of “aufhebende Sprechakte” (1991, 118, “countermanding speech acts”, translation mine) by which initial affirmations are not openly contradicted, but ultimately nullified by subsequent assertions. Bürgel elaborates, for instance, on advantageous opportunities that Parteien (“applicants”), such as K., could seize in order to achieve their goal against all odds. Simultaneously, however, Bürgel suggests that these opportunities cannot be seized.173 Examples of these “countermanding speech acts” are abundant in Bürgel’s speech. He makes highly important claims about the “whole situation” (“Gesamtlage”), thereby representing himself as having sufficient knowledge to evaluate such a situation, and simultaneously denies his competence for speech acts like these (see Kellerwessel 1991, 1181). He denies his

172 Of course, this reading leaves many questions open, especially concerning the role of Klamm, but this fact does not necessarily devaluate a metaleptic reading. Kafka may have made punctual use of this metaleptic device instead of establishing a coherent system of narrative levels in which all characters and actions can be located unambiguously. Anyway, if Kafka has punctually made use of metalepsis – not in the sense of a transgression of boundaries performed by a character, but in the sense of an involvement of the novel itself in the thoughts and language use of diegetic characters and, perhaps, of the narrator –, then this device is clearly a further technique by which Kafka withdraws consistency and keeps readers in processes of coherence in progress. 173 “Laut Bürgel gibt es günstige Gelegenheiten, etwas zu erreichen, in denen es allerdings ausgeschlossen ist, etwas zu erreichen! Der Hörer, also K., kann darin nur etwas Mißverständliches oder aber eine bewußte Irreführung sehen, denn schließlich wird ihm zunächst das Gegenteil dessen zu verstehen gegeben, was nachher explizit behauptet wird” (Kellerwessel 1991, 1181).

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intention to rectify the wrong impressions of newcomers and in the same breath does rectify, emphatically, the fallacious ideas of those who have only lately arrived.174 Moreover, Bürgel makes many claims that contradict the very situation in which Bürgel himself and K. are right at that moment. For example, he is neither angry about K.’s unannounced entry into his room – as secretaries would be, according to Bürgel –, 175 nor does he lack the time to interact with K. – as secretaries would do, according to Bürgel, if they are confronted with applicants for whom they are not responsible.176 It seems to me, however, that Bürgel’s speech – and the coherence in progress it provokes – lives not only by countermanding speech acts, but also by a further technique, which I call reframing. This technique is, however, not restricted to the Bürgel episode; it shapes the entire novel, both on a micro- and on a macrolevel.

5.4.10 Problems of interpretation: Reframing and Deframing One of the most striking techniques that Kafka employs throughout his novel consists of providing information that becomes repeatedly recontextualised in a way that infringes on the information’s validity or reliability. Since the context provides the frame on which the meaning one ascribes to the information depends, I propose to call this technique reframing. Reframing, as I conceive of it with regard to Kafka’s narrativity, denotes, in other words, the fact that the conceptual, interpretative “frames” (or contexts) of utterances change such that the respective utterances appear constantly in a new light. This technique prevents the ascription of a stable, reliable meaning to diegetic facts.

174 “Es scheint ja hier manches daraufhin eingerichtet abzuschrecken, und wenn man neu hier ankommt, scheinen einem die Hindernisse völlig undurchdringlich. Ich will nicht untersuchen, wie es sich damit eigentlich verhält, vielleicht entspricht der Schein tatsächlich der Wirklichkeit, in meiner Stellung fehlt mir der richtige Abstand, um das festzustellen, aber merken Sie auf, es ergeben sich dann doch wieder manchmal Gelegenheiten, die mit der Gesamtlage fast nicht übereinstimmen, Gelegenheiten bei welchen durch ein Wort, durch einen Blick, durch ein Zeichen des Vertrauens mehr erreicht werden kann, als durch lebenslange, auszehrende Bemühungen. Gewiß so ist es” (S, 409–410). 175 “Zunächst würde man dadurch den zuständigen Sekretär sehr erbittern [. . .], [. . .] gegenüber den Parteien dürfen wir Störungen der Zuständigkeit keinesfalls dulden” (S, 418). 176 “Solche Versuche müssen übrigens auch daran scheitern, daß ein unzuständiger Sekretär [. . .] kaum mehr eingreifen kann als irgendein beliebiger Advokat [. . .] denn ihm fehlt ja [ . . . .] einfach für Dinge, bei denen er nicht zuständig ist, jede Zeit, keinen Augenblick kann er dafür verwenden” (S, 418). This utterance sharply contradicts his lengthy soliloquy.

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An example for a simple form of reframing can be found in the following description of Frieda’s hands: “Ihre Hände waren klein und zart, aber man hätte sie auch schwach und nichtssagend nennen können” (S, 62).177 If one frees the sentence from its interpretative, judgmental dimensions, the following information could be distilled from the sentence: Frieda has narrow, fine-boned hands. The question for K., however, is to know how this physical feature should be interpreted (i.e., what her hands “mean”). This interpretation, for its part, depends on the context in which the information is embedded. The sentence presents two diametrically opposed ways of contextualising and thus interpreting Frieda’s hands. The first part of the sentence embeds the information in a positive context, more precisely, in a positive picture of Frieda’s character. According to this positive character frame, her hands are considered to stand metonymically for Frieda’s alleged fragility and delicateness. The second part of the sentence, however, reinterprets the perception of her hands by embedding it – on trial, so to speak – in a contrary, negative character context. According to this negative frame, the hands reveal now an alleged weakness, something like an inability to accomplish something. What is the effect, in this example, of reframing? Since it is not clear which of the two interpretative contexts (i.e. which of the two characterisations) is the “right” one, K. cannot ascribe meaning to Frieda’s hands. Consequently, the interpretation fails and meaning is withdrawn. In other words, there is no larger context, no interpretative consistency or unity that could help to ascribe meaning to the detail. This is an example of Kafka’s technique, which lives by a multiplicity of diegetic facts, events and details that are unintelligible in terms of a higher diegetic unity. Reframing can therefore be considered to be a rhizomatic technique, more precisely, to be a literary performance of Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of multiplicity (“n-1”): “it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as substantive, ‘multiplicity’, that it ceases to have any relation to the One as a subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 8).178 The narrative context is always important for the acknowledgment of interpretative reframing. In the example considered above, K. hardly knows Frieda at

177 “Her hands were certainly small and delicate, but they could quite as well have been called weak and characterless” (CA-M, 39). 178 And: “Unity always operates in an empty dimensions supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding). The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9).

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this point of the novel. He has just entered the Herrenhof and has bandied some words with her. This is important because the kind of interpretation with which K. seeks to provide his perception of Frieda’s hand aims at reading her hands as an expression of her character. But insofar as K. barely knows Frieda, he does not have a broader concept of her character. His interpretative effort must therefore fail; it cannot pass beyond the insight that there are interpretative alternatives (at least if he wishes to provide a well-grounded, unbiased interpretation).179 Scholars have acknowledged certain facets of this technique of reframing, e.g. under the heading of “reinterpretation”,180 but, as far as I see, only with regard to the narrative macro-level and without distinguishing sufficiently between narrative form and function. Scholars have emphasised, for instance, the great amount of direct speech,181 that is, the numerous conversations between K. and other characters, which reveal (or create) a number of mutually inconsistent stories, perspectives and world views.182 Fromm, for instance, explains that the novel uses the technique of “perspectival change” (“Technik des perspektivischen Wechsels”) according to which the castle is an “encryption of the relationships that the characters entertain with each other, with themselves and their lives. The encryptions gain their meaning through the simultaneous validity or invalidity of the perspectives”183 (2010, 304, translation mine). Busse (2001, 131) makes a similar point: for her, the novel does not represent an “objectively” described (diegetic) reality, but offers instead a number of character-bound versions of reality, which are due to the characters’ experiences.184 She theorises this withdrawal

179 K., however, tends indeed to impose his judgment on the people and things he experiences. Even before the description of her hands, he describes Frieda’s body as “poor”, contrasting it with the delicate blouse she wears (“leichte ausgeschnittene cremefarbige Bluse, die wie fremd auf ihrem armen Körper lag”, S, 61). There is obviously a strong semantic connection between this passage and Kafka’s short work Kleider, which can unfortunately not be explored within the limited confines of this chapter. 180 See, e.g., my summary of Kafalenos’s (1995) approach in section 5.2.2. 181 According to Kellerwessel (1991), seventy-five percent of the novel consist of dialogue. Zeller (1986) states that the percentage of dialogue per novel increases from Der Verschollene until Das Schloss. Schenk (2005, 234) argues that dialogue structures are the central device in terms of both narrative structure and subject matters. 182 “In einer Gesprächssituation trifft die Perspektive K.s auf die Perspektiven weiterer Figuren, wodurch sich verschiedene Deutungen von Wirklichkeit gegenüberstehen” (Busse 2001, 172). 183 “Das Schloss ist eine Chiffrierung für die Verhältnisse der Romanfiguren zueinander, zu sich und zu ihrem Leben. Die Chiffrierungen erhalten ihre Bedeutungen in der gleichzeitigen Gültigkeit oder Ungültigkeit der Perspektiven.” 184 “Es gibt also keine ‘objektiv’ beschriebene Wirklichkeit im Roman, sondern das einzig Wirkliche sind die sich ändernden Auffassungen der Figur von Wirklichkeit, die von ihren subjektiven Erfahrungen geprägt sind” (Busse 2001, 131). While these observations are reminiscent of

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of reality in terms of a Nietzschean concept of “perspective”, arguing that each character in the novel has a different perspective and a different interpretative access to reality. For Busse, K. becomes aware of the subjectivity of each one’s perspective as he listens to the other characters.185 It should be noted that reframing is not the effect of other techniques (such as extensive use of direct speech or perspective), but a formal technique in its own right, which can be found both on the macro- and on the micro-level of narrative structure. What all of the examples have in common is that they turn questions of comprehension, of interpretation and meaning-making into a subject matter.186 For example, K. shows ostensible difficulty in imbuing Amalia’s rebuff of Sortini, narrated by Olga, with meaning: “Amalias Tat ist merkwürdig, aber je mehr du von der Tat erzählst, desto weniger läßt sich entscheiden, ob sie groß oder klein, klug oder töricht, heldenhaft oder feig gewesen ist [. . .]” (S, 312). It is the variety of contextual frames that makes it impossible for K. to ascribe meaning to Amalia’s deed. K. experiences a similar problem when he tries to evaluate the outcome of his encounter with Momus, that is, of his refusal to be interrogated by Momus: Irgendwie [. . .] fiel ihm ein, wie sich die Wirtin bemüht hatte ihm dem Protokoll gefügig zu machen, wie er aber standgehalten hatte. Es war freilich keine offene Bemühung, im Geheimen hatte sie ihn gleichzeitig vom Protokoll fortgezerrt, schließlich wußte man (S, 186) nicht ob man standgehalten oder nachgegeben hatte.187

Bakhtine’s concept of “polyphony”, it should be noted that Kafka’s narrativity cannot be reduced to such a “polyphonic” gestalt. The information conveyed in the dialogues is so inconsistent that the diegetic reality itself dissipates: Klamm, the castle, the assistants, Frieda – the more we learn about diegetic reality, the less we understand it. 185 “Der interpretierende Zugriff zeigt sich nicht nur in den Aussagen der Hauptfigur, sondern die Hauptfigur nimmt den Zugriff gleichfalls in den Aussagen anderer Figuren wahr. In einer Gesprächssituation trifft die Perspektive K.s auf die Perspektiven weiterer Figuren, wodurch sich verschiedene Deutungen von Wirklichkeit gegenüberstehen” (Busse 2001, 172). Also Witte (2009, 52) claims that K. develops. As he argues, K. acknowledges the “mechanisms of subjective meaning-making” (“Mechanismen der subjektiven Bedeutungszuweisung”) at the end of the novel, when he comments on Pepi’s narrative in terms of wild fantasy. 186 Scholars have justifiably pointed out that interpretation is perhaps the central subject matter of the novel. Witte (2009, 51) argues that K. is primarily busy with the interpretation of actions, attitudes and gestures. Schenk (2005) highlights the fact that interpretation is an important topic in the dialogues that take place between K. and other characters, for example in the conversation between K. and the Vorsteher about Klamm’s letter (see Schenk 2005, 237–238). 187 “Somehow [. . .] he thought of how the landlady had endeavored to make him amenable to the deposition and how he had held his ground. It was not a candid effort, though, for she had at the same time furtively dragged him away from the deposition, and ultimately one couldn’t tell whether one had held one’s ground or given way” (CA-H, 117).

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The two rivalling interpretations of both K.’s and the landlady’s behaviour could not be more inverted and contradictory. What they indicate is the lack of an encompassing frame of the castle, including its interests, strategies and staff. If one does not know what the castle wants and how it works, one can neither understand the meaning of such a “protocol” nor the meaning of one’s resistance to it. By using the technique of reframing, Kafka thus brings a very specific hermeneutic problem out into open, namely the relationship between parts (i.e. details) and the whole (i.e. the embedding frame or system). Both K. and the readers have to learn, as they roam around in the world of The Castle, that it is impossible to interpret any detail if one lacks the bigger picture. In other words: the meaning of a thing depends on its contextual frame, on the way one embeds the detail in a larger system of reference. Another example of reframing is the episode where K. awaits Klamm. While K. shows no aggression at all, the landlady later reinterprets K.’s waiting as an “attempted assault on Klamm” (“versuchten Überfall auf Klamm”, S, 178). Problems of interpretation are, however, not only a subject matter discussed or experienced by fictive characters. Interpretative failure breaks the barriers of the diegesis and impinges on the reader. The diverse characters present the same facts in very different ways, such that no diegetic fact can gain a stable meaning for the reader. Let me draw on just one example: the love story between Frieda and K. In the episode in which Frieda leaves Klamm by not following Klamm’s call (and by remaining with K. on the floor of the Herrenhof), Frieda seems to have made this decision willingly. Later, in K.’s conversation with the landlady, Gardena reframes the whole love story, describing K. as a man who has intentionally pulled Frieda out of “the happiest condition” and presents Frieda as a martyr who has saved K. out of pity for his miserable condition (see S, 88). Pepi, for her part, reframes the whole story again: in her story, K. is not the villain, but “a hero, a girl liberator” (“ein Held, ein Mädchenbefreier”, S, 453) and Frieda is a sly egoist who has become K.’s lover only in order to be the villagers’ centre of attention of once again and in order to save her position at the Herrenhof. Interestingly, the characters embed diegetic facts, such as K.’s and Frieda’s relationship, in narrative contexts. Storytelling allows them to reframe events in compliance with their own world views. Scholars have already pointed to the importance of storytelling in intradiegetic conversations. The characters’ narratives lay bare the ways in which everyone creates his or her own reality by combining different elements of reality in idiosyncratic ways. As Busse puts it: “Während die Wirklichkeit selbst unendlich vielgestaltig ist und unendlich viel gedeutet werden kann, trifft das Subjekt immer nur eine Auswahl aus dieser Wirklichkeit

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und gibt ihr einen partiellen Sinn”188 (2001, 144). Considered from this perspective, the novel can be said to lay bare interpretative processes of narrative coherence in progress and their meaning-making effects. K.’s and the readers’ interpretative problems are practically always closely interconnected, mostly because readers are immersed in K.’s perspective and in his efforts of comprehension. Nonetheless, one should be aware of the fact that K. himself is the object of an interpretative problem as well. Consider the following example (which has to do again with Frieda’s hands): “‘Mit diesen zarten Händen,’ sagte K. halb fragend und wußte selbst nicht, ob er nur schmeichelte oder auch wirklich von ihr bezwungen war” (S, 62).189 The narrator offers two interpretations of K.’s utterance (“Mit diesen zarten Händen”) between which K. himself is said to be unable to choose. K.’s comment can be interpreted both as a strategic move, a lie used to flatter Frieda, and as an involuntary sign of enchantment. The technique of reframing relies in this example on the rivalry of two contrary frames of K.’s character (which provide readers with two rivalling contexts of interpretation). According to the first interpretative frame, K. is a manipulative liar whose actions are directed by his self-interests; according to the second one, he is rather a sensitive, open-hearted person, susceptible to beauty and ready to engage in passionate feelings. Readers are confronted with the fact that they do not really know who K. is. They feel that they have no stable schema of K.’s character that could frame their interpretative activities. Briefly, his personality becomes, through reframing, an interpretative blank and his words and actions therefore a mystery. According to the definition given at the beginning of this section, reframing relies primarily on the presentation of different, inconsistent contexts. Additionally, the novel highlights two other dimensions that partake in reframing, which present an obstacle for interpretation: subjectivity and language. The problem of subjectivity has already been evident in some of the examples given above. Readers experience K.’s waiting for Klamm initially from K.’s subjective perspective. Later, however, the same action is completely reinterpreted by Gardena, obviously due to her very subjective world view. Another good example for Kafka’s exploration of the subjective, biased character of meaning and interpretation, but simultaneously also of the pitfalls of language can be found in the Bürgel episode, which provides a subtle and complex form of

188 “While reality itself is infinitely polymorphic and can be interpreted in endlessly different ways, the subject has to make a selection out of this reality, constrained to give it a partial sense” (translation mine). 189 “‘With those delicate hands’, said K. half-questioningly, without knowing himself whether he was only flattering her or was compelled by something in her” (CA-M, 39).

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reframing. Bürgel declares paradoxically both the impossibility and possibility of the situation in which he actually finds himself while he is speaking: Und nun erwägen Sie Herr Landvermesser die Möglichkeit, daß eine Partei durch irgendwelche Umstände trotz der Ihnen schon beschriebenen [. . .] Hindernisse dennoch mitten in der Nacht einen Sekretär überrascht [. . .] Sie glauben es kann gar nicht vorkommen? Sie haben Recht, es kann gar nicht vorkommen. Aber eines Nachts – wer kann für alles bürgen? – kommt es doch vor. (S, 420–421)190

This short passage is indeed, first and foremost, an example of another technique, namely the withdrawal of contradictions (see section 5.4.4).191 The dynamics of reframing, by contrast, becomes evident only in the course of Bürgel’s speech, i.e. in the way his thoughts develop. The question of whether the situation (in which he actually finds himself) is objectively (be it theoretically or empirically) a possibility or an impossibility drifts in the course of his speech into a reflection on whether a secretary has to be afraid of this situation (“daß es also sehr übertrieben ist, sich vor ihr zu fürchten”, S, 421). Bürgel explains that the depicted situation could be “rendered harmless” by (the speech act of) proving (to that situation!) that there is no room for it.192 He adds that it is anyway pathetic to hide under the blanket out of fear of being exposed to such a situation.193 However, given that Bürgel manifests exactly this “pathetic” behaviour earlier, at the moment when K. enters the room, Bürgel’s whole soliloquy loses its denotative (truth-related) force. His fear becomes the

190 “And now, Land Surveyor, consider the possibility that through some circumstances or other, in spite of the obstacles already described to you, [. . .] an applicant does nevertheless, in the middle of the night, surprise a secretary [. . .] You think it cannot happen at all? You are right, it cannot happen at all. But some night – for who can vouch for everything – it does happen” (CA-M, 269). 191 The initial theoretical opposition of the possibility versus impossibility of the situation is being deteriorated by the introduction of a new, higher-level opposition: that of theory versus empiricism. The question of knowing whether it is possible versus impossible, in the villagecastle sphere, that a client surprises, in the middle of the night, a secretary who is not charged with this client’s case, pertains to the domain of theory. Bürgel elaborates, evidently, on the theoretical possibility versus impossibility of the respective situation, which stands in a comic contrast to its practical pertinence. At the end of the passage, however, Bürgel recontextualises his theoretical reflections, by introducing a new, higher-level opposition: that between theoretical possibilities and practical, empirical evidence: “eines Nachts [. . .] kommt es doch vor.” 192 “Selbst wenn sie [i.e. the situation, ESW] wirklich geschehen sollte, kann man sie – sollte man glauben – förmlich dadurch unschädlich machen, daß man ihr [. . .] beweist, für sie sei kein Platz auf dieser Welt” (S, 421). 193 “Jedenfalls ist es krankhaft, wenn man sich aus Angst vor ihr etwa unter der Decke versteckt und nicht wagt hinauszuschauen” (S, 421).

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decisive communicative context for his soliloquy. In other words, the reader is required to reframe Bürgel’s speech in terms of his personal, fear-directed goals. Bürgel does not provide reliable information on the castle and its officials, but merely seeks to eliminate the very situation in which he is (by arguing for the theoretical impossibility of his own situation). The Bürgel episode thus draws (inter alia) attention to the subjectivity of meaning and to the pitfalls of communication. There are personal interests and goals that frame any communication. If the characters of the novel, such as Bürgel, are biased in their communication, if they have hidden feelings, thoughts or goals, then the information given by them cannot be used to build a reliable schema of the world, since the information is (possibly) not “neutral”, not reliable, not truthful. Consequentially, diegetic factuality and denotative reliability are being withdrawn. Interestingly, Bürgel’s name, which is phonetically very similar to the German word “bürgen” (to vouch), points exactly to this problem: “Aber eines Nachts – wer kann für alles bürgen? – kommt es doch vor.”194 The question of vouching (“bürgen”) is indeed the crucial problem of the whole plot of Das Schloss. As many researchers have argued, neither K. nor the reader succeeds in obtaining “vouched”, true, unambiguous information, which could help to decide what is the case in the world of village and castle (and what is not).195 Kellerwessel (1991) argues in his language-philosophical approach to Das Schloss that the problem does not reside primarily or exclusively in the fact that the characters have a restricted, subjective perspective and incomplete knowledge about the diegetic world, but rather in the fact that it is most often impossible to decide whether the speech acts of K.’s interlocutors are “strategic” or “communicative” in nature. One cannot determine whether the characters wish to provide reliable information or whether they intend to convey distorted information in order to achieve private goals. The devaluation of (or mistrust in) communication is the necessary consequence. This crisis of communication is worsened by the impossibility, experienced by K., of gaining insight into the 194 “But some night – for who can vouch for everything? – it does happen” (CA-M, 269, orig. emphasis). 195 As Busse puts it: “Er [the narrator, ESW] bietet keinen festen Punkt an, an welchem sich die Lesenden Gewißheit verschaffen könnten, welche der Deutungen ‘richtig’ oder ‘falsch’ ist” (2001, 187). Although this phenomenon is surely linked to what narratologists call “unreliability”, since nothing is reliable in Kafka’s world, it seems to me that the difference relies in the universality of this technique in Kafka’s narratives. We are not simply confronted with a single narrator or character who is unreliable, but practically everything is untrustworthy in Das Schloss: the narrator, all characters and therefore everything that happens. It is the technique of reframing, of continuous reinterpretation that produces this fundamental uncertainty.

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subjective contexts of utterances, which are indeed the key to their meanings.196 But if the novel (and its reality) lives by communication, by dialogues,197 then diegetic reality is almost completely withdrawn from K. and the reader. Re-framing then amounts to de-framing: readers (and K.) are deprived of any encompassing, stable world frame, that is, of a “bigger picture” in terms of which diegetic details could be provided with meaning. Consider, for instance, K.’s waiting for Klamm in the inner yard of the Herrenhof. Suddenly “everything became bright, the electric lights blazed insight” and “a gentleman came slowly out of the house. The only consolation that remained was that it was not Klamm, or was not that rather a pity?” (CA-M, 106). Consolation or pity, the interpretation of the diegetic detail (of a man not being Klamm coming out of the house) could not be more contrary; yet, the two interpretative possibilities are available, simply because K. lacks the bigger picture, i.e. the frame that would allow him to make an adequate judgment. While the short-term effect of reframing and deframing may be an increased effort of comprehension (narrativity in actualisation), the long-term effect must be a sort of readerly confusion, a mental “deterritorialisation”. If contexts undergo constant changes, interpreters must surrender to the eternal flow and clash of meanings, lost in the novel’s “vertiginous ocean of uninterpreted detail” (Miller 1991, 136). To conclude, both K. and the reader are constantly held in a process of coherence in progress: The narrative is a never-ending flow of successively presented interpretations and reinterpretations of facts, events and things by various characters. Meanings can consequentially never condensate. Busse formulates a similar insight: Die Figuren stehen in einem auslegenden Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit. Der Erzähler bringt dieses Verhältnis mit einer besonderen Erzählweise zum Vorschein. Er bietet keinen festen Punkt an, an welchem sich die Lesenden Gewißheit verschaffen könnten, welche der Deutungen ‘richtig’ oder ‘falsch’ ist. Die Wirklichkeit wird also selbst nur als eine Deutung des Erzählers vermittelt, die wiederum von den Lesenden gedeutet werden muß. [. . .] Das (Busse 2001, 187) Erzählen selbst vollzieht sich als ein deutendes Verfahren.198

196 A masterful example is the series of inscrutable statements made by Gardena during her first dialogue with K. 197 “Die zahlreichen Gesprächserzählungen sind für die Narration nicht nur Zutat, sondern vielmehr konstitutiv” (Schenk 2005, 238). 198 “The characters’ relationship to reality is interpretative in nature. The narrator brings this relationship to light by means of a special technique of narration. He does not offer a stable perspective that readers could adopt in order to decide which of the interpretations is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Reality is thus presented as the narrator’s interpretation, which in turn has to be

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Narration becomes a means of interpretation, interpretation has a narrative shape and the two are governed by processes of meaning-making, problematised by the technique of reframing.

5.5 Narrative withdrawal: Incompatible with meaningfulness and representation? 5.5.1 Between meta-dichotomies: Meaning versus absurdity, negative versus affirmative thinking In section 5.4, I have analysed a number of techniques by which Kafka “prolonges” (as one could say with a side glance to Shklovsky) the processes of reading and understanding, keeping the reader in the stage of narrativity in actualisation. According to my analysis, Kafka withdraws consistency by making extensive use of contradictions (which he simultaneously withdraws) and inversion, by deconstructing dichotomies, by metaleptically short-circuiting narrative levels, by juxtaposing countermanding speech acts and by re- (and de- ) framing narrative elements. Readers are thereby held in a continuous process of coherence in progress: they work towards integrating the inconsistent narrative elements into a consistent whole. Already the sheer number of techniques by which Kafka assures the withdrawal of coherence and meaning suggests, however, that Kafka’s novel is not designed to cohere and to “make sense”; in other words, it does not require a reader whose interpretative genius succeeds in creating a single, coherent and meaningful narrative schema. Instead, his text calls for a reader who is willing (i) to face the enormous range of inconsistencies, (ii) to accept and feel, for the time of reading, the failure of her or his cognito-logical abilities and (iii) to enter, against all odds, Kafka’s interpretative burrow. But if the novel’s extraordinarily “difficult” structures and hermeneutic tasks are not designed to be solved, do we have to assume then that the novel has no meaning? Is it, in other words, an absurd work? Do we fall back, then, onto a reading à la Camus? First of all, I disagree with reductive summaries of Camus’s analysis according to which Camus reads Kafka’s Castle as “absurd” (in the sense of devoid of

interpreted by the readers. [. . .] The narration itself unfolds as an ongoing interpretation” (translation mine).

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meaning).199 His argument is far more complex. Camus’s approach performs indeed an “interpretative ascent”200 par excellence: he both carves out the various contradictions within Kafka’s narratives, including Das Schloss, and provides the corresponding incoherence with interpretative meaning – in terms of “absurdity”: Ces perpétuels balancements entre le naturel et l'extraordinaire, l'individu et l'universel, le tragique et le quotidien, l'absurde et le logique se retrouvent à travers toute son œuvre et lui donnent à la fois sa résonance et sa signification. Ce sont ces paradoxes qu'il faut énumérer, ces contradictions qu’il faut renforcer, pour comprendre l'œuvre absurde. (Camus 1974, 172, emphasis mine)201

Interestingly, there are obviously two kinds of absurdity. The contrast between “the absurd and the logical” (“l’absurde et le logique”) is itself one of the contradictions that produce the “absurdity” of Das Schloss. Camus exemplifies this contrast with the “naturalness” and simplicity by which the protagonist accepts the most strange and disconcerting reality.202 According to Camus, the necessity and logic in terms of which the protagonist reacts on the illogic of the world that surrounds him creates a contrast, which, for its part, brings about an effect not only of absurdity, but also of tragedy.203 On the level of content, this tragic effect arises, according to Camus, through the contrast between the

199 See, for example, Busse’s summary: “Heinz Politzer ebnete mit seiner These der Vieldeutigkeit von Kafka’s Werk den Weg für interpretatorischer [sic!] Willkür und Beliebigkeit der Auslegung, während u.a. Albert Camus gerade den Sinn des Werkes in dessen Sinnlosigkeit sah” (2001, 9). See also Henel (1967, 251). 200 See my considerations on the phenomenon of “interpretative ascent” in section 6.4. 201 “These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the absurd work” (Camus 1963, 148). 202 “Il y a des œuvres où l’événement semble naturel au lecteur. Mais il en est d’autres (plus rares, il est vrai) où c’est le personnage qui trouve naturel ce qui lui arrive. Par un paradoxe singulier mais évident, plus les aventures du personnage seront extraordinaires, et plus le naturel du récit se fera sensible: il est proportionnel à l’écart qu’on peut sentir entre l’étrangeté d’une vie d’homme et la simplicité avec quoi cet homme l’accepte. Il semble que ce naturel soit celui de Kafka” (Camus 1974, 170–171). 203 “Dans une œuvre tragique, le destin se fait toujours mieux sentir sous les visages de la logique et du naturel” (Camus 1974, 173).

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protagonist’s unswerving “search for mercy”204 (sign of an “inquiétude surnaturelle”) and his “ethics” of “submission to daily routine.”205 Camus emphasises the tenacity by which Kafka’s heroes renew their attempts to attain their goals, despite the obvious hopelessness of these attempts. This observation incites Camus finally to relativise his hypothesis of absurdity. He interprets the protagonist’s tenacity as a “forceful yell of hope” (“immense cri d’espoir”, 182) by the author. If Kafka knows that his heroes cannot succeed, and if he cannot stop writing nonetheless, it is because his writing is a performance of hope, which provides the author with the meaning he needs.206 According to this interpretation, absurdity is not the last word: “L’absurde est reconnu, accepté, l’homme s’y résigne et dès cet instant, nous savons qu’il n’est plus l’absurde” (Camus 1974, 182).207 More explicitly : “[. . .] son œuvre n’est probablement pas absurde. Mais [. . .] cela ne nous prive pas de voir sa grandeur et son universalité” (183).208 In a nutshell, Camus interprets Kafka’s illogical, inconsistent narratives simultaneously as an intentional portrayal of absurdity (on the level of narrative contents) and as a non-absurd means to fight and overcome the latter (on the level of authorial poetics). Does Camus thus argue for the existence of meaning in Kafka’s work or for an absence of meaning? Camus’s answer seems to lie somewhere between these two possibilities insofar as it evades the binary logic implied by the very question. One could reproach Camus with this ambiguousness. But, from my point of view, this ambiguousness itself reveals something about Kafka’s literature. Camus describes, in the upshot, a paradoxical structure, which he considers to be fundamental for Kafka’s poetics. Interestingly, other theorists have discovered a similar paradoxical structure (especially Kienlechner), even though they use

204 “[. . .] c’est l’aventure essentielle d’une âme en quête de sa grâce qui est figurée” (Camus 1974, 175). The influence of Brod’s allegorical interpretation of Das Schloss becomes quite obvious here. 205 “[. . .] cette soumission au quotidien devient une éthique” (Camus 1974, 178). 206 “Le créateur ne peut plus s’en séparer [de l’œuvre, ESW]. Elle [l’œuvre, ESW] n’est pas le jeu tragique qu’elle devait être. Elle donne un sens à la vie de l’auteur” (Camus 1974, 181). Engel’s considerations take a similar direction. He argues that K. would be left without any goal and thus in an absolute void if he reached his goal: “Wenn man ein absolutes Ziel wirklich erreicht hätte, gäbe es kein Ziel mehr – dann bliebe nur völlige Leere” (2013, 190). Whether Engel draws exclusively on K., or also on the author, cannot be said with certainty; his use of the German pronoun “man” leaves space for both interpretations. 207 “The absurd is recognized, accepted, and man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd” (Camus 1963, 153). 208 “[. . .] his work is probably not absurd. But that should not deter us from seeing its nobility and universality” (Camus 1963, 154).

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other terms to describe it. Before I come to Kienlechner, I would like to emphasise, with regard to Camus, that absurdity as a concept denotes the absence of meaning, but this absence makes itself paradoxically present. Camus’s understanding of Kafka’s absurdity thus does not comply with the dichotomic alternatives of meaning versus absurdity or of presence versus absence of meaning; the two terms are paradoxically interrelated. Considered from Camus’s perspective, Kafka’s literature represents, deplores and fights an absence, thereby creating a meaning that is, paradoxically, only “negatively” present. Camus’s analysis correlates structurally with Kienlechner’s (1981) hypothesis whose summary requires some space. Kienlechner claims that Kafka’s literature can best be characterised as a rejection of affirmative thinking.209 She argues that Kafka does not believe in the possibility of finding and expressing truth. Nonetheless, one of the basic dimensions of poetry is its aspiration for truth. According to Kienlechner, Kafka therefore lives the paradox: he wants to write poetry, he wants to write truth, but if truth withdraws forever, any attempt to catch it (i.e. to write it down) must fail. Kafka is thus condemned to do the wrong thing anyway. If he does not follow the poetic call for truth, he betrays himself, that is, his poetic soul and existence. But if he tries to represent the truth, his behaviour contradicts simultaneously that same truth (according to which no truth can be found and represented). As Kienlechner argues, Kafka decides for the following solution. He makes an effort to represent the very problem just explained above: the unbridgeable gap between language and truth. Simultaneously, he knows, however (according to the “logic” inherent in the paradox), that he can never succeed in it; he therefore has to fail his poetic vocation210 and to betray simultaneously the deeper truth of the eternal withdrawal of meaning.211 The whole

209 “In der Tat ist man Kafkas Reflexion am nächsten, wenn man sie begreift als die äußerste Anstrengung, sich dem Drang zur Affirmation im Denken und Urteilen zu widersetzen. Kafka wendet sich zum gegenteiligen Verhalten, dem der Negativität” (Kienlechner 1981, 6). 210 Sokel (1980) defends another hypothesis according to which Kafka’s failure is due to his duplicity, that is, to his urge to observe himself. This auto-split into subject and object prevents Kafka from realising his poetic ideal according to which the author becomes one with her/his text. 211 I will quote the entire passage for its importance and density: “Im Bewußtsein, daß Wahrheit sich der Erkenntnis entzogen hat, ins Unerreichbare entrückt ist, traut Kafka der Dichtung nicht (oder nicht mehr) zu, daß sie das in ‘dieser Welt’ Wahrgenommene in ihre Sprache aufnimmt, ordnet und in dieser Ordnung einer Wahrheit zum Ausdruck verhilft. Gleichwohl besteht auch in der Dichtung der unverminderte Anspruch darauf: als eine Form von Erkenntnis hat sie die Aufgabe, sich um Wahrheit zu bemühen und sie darzustellen. Aus diesem Widerspruch entsteht ein offenbar unüberwindbares Problem der Vermittlung: Sucht die Dichtung ihrem Anspruch gerecht zu werden und Wahrheit darzustellen, so mißachtet sie das

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problem results, according to Kienlechner, in a “supreme effort to fight the urge of affirmative thinking and judgment” (“äußerste Anstrengung, sich dem Drang zur Affirmation im Denken und Urteilen zu widersetzen”, 6), which gives birth to Kafka’s specific “negative”212 (as opposed to affirmative) mode of thinking.213 Interestingly, this analysis is very consistent with Tsur’s conviction (2008, 511) according to which Kafka’s Castle is a work of art that demands an extraordinarily high degree of “negative capability”, that is, according to Keats, the capacity “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (quoted in Tsur 2008, 511). It also complies well with Camus’s analysis whose notion of “absurdity” corresponds to Kienlechner’s “negativity” insofar as the two concepts are meant to denote, on the one hand, the absence (or elusiveness) of truth or meaning and, on the other hand, the ways in which Kafka deals with this (first-level) absence or elusiveness: Kafka acknowledges and appropriates this absence of truth or meaning, making this negativity the subject and device of his literature. Alt’s (1985) analysis lays bare the same poetic structure (see below). Kienlechner’s (1981) hypothesis is convincing because it is able to explain a number of widely acknowledged, fundamental characteristics of Kafka’s literature: the current subject-matter of guilt and of interpretation, the apparent necessity of the protagonist’s failures, the protagonist’s sustained efforts to reach something that always withdraws itself,214 the high frequency of intradiegetic misunderstandings, the fact that K. himself is sometimes unsure about himself, the ubiquity of paradoxical (and “drifting”) structures, his “poetics of indication” (“Poetik von Andeutung und Verweisung”, see Kessler

Bewußstein davon, daß Wahrheit ins Unerreichbare entrückt ist; sie fällt in vorkritische Naivität zurück und wird damit unwahr, ‘ideologisch’. Sucht sie hingegen dem kritischen Bewußtsein vom Verlust der Wahrheit gerecht zu werden, so gibt sie damit ihren Anspruch preis, der ihr jedoch wesentlich ist. Der ihr von allen Seiten drohenden Unwahrheit kann die Dichtung nur entgehen, indem sie ihren problematischen Widerspruch, das Auseinanderklaffen von Sprache und Wahrheit, kenntlich macht” (Kienlechner 1981, 8). 212 Bonnefoy (2008) works with the concept of negativity as well in order to describe Kafka’s literature. 213 Kienlechner’s hypothesis is somehow already implied by Barthes’s considerations on Kafka: “La technique de Kafka dit que le sens du monde n’est pas énonçable, que la seule tâche de l’artiste, c’est d’explorer des significations possibles, dont chacune prise à part ne sera que mensonge (nécessaire) mais dont la multiplicité sera la vérité même de l’écrivain. Voilà le paradoxe de Kafka: l’art dépend de la vérité, mais la vérité, étant indivisible, ne peut se connaître elle-même: dire la vérité, c’est mentir” (Barthes 1984, 1272–1273, orig. emphasis). 214 As Thorlby (1987, 33) puts it with regard to The Trial: “K. never gains access to anything. He will never find out what his trial is about, in fact; he is misled by the way he thinks about it – misled by language.”

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1983, 122–123)215 as well as, last but not least, the various techniques that shatter consistency and ensure the continuous search for coherence, meaning and truth. Nonetheless, one question is left open by Kienlechner: Which kind of “truth” is at stake here? The same question could be addressed to Camus: The absence of which “meaning” torments Kafka? Kafka’s paradox, as it has been explained by Kienlechner, does, of course, not allow for an answer. If truth withdraws, we cannot catch it either. Nonetheless, Kienlechner’s hypothesis could be concretised with regard to Kafka’s much-discussed language scepticism. Kafka’s texts clearly do not only reflect on the possibility of understanding, of finding truth and meaning.216 As I have argued above; they also reflect on the (im)possibility of (successful) communication.

5.5.2 Crisis of representation and performativity Many scholars share the view that Kafka’s narratives are somehow shaped by the contemporary crisis of representation,217 associated with names such as Brentano, Mauthner, Wittgenstein and von Hofmannsthal.218 Biographical evidence undergirds this claim. Kafka discussed problems with which Mauthner was beset with his friend Pollack (see Schenk 2005, 232). Concerning Kafka’s relation to the crisis of representation, Thorlby argues that “Kafka was more interested in creating a gap between form and content than in closing it (as the rules of art traditionally demand)” (1987, 37). According to Thorlby, it is this gap that is encapsulated in the notion of “the Kafkaesque”:

215 Also Lehmann draws on this poetics: “die Schrift erscheint als der Signifikant par excellence, an dem der unaufhörliche Ver-zug, das Sich-Vergaloppieren, die Verschiebung und Verzweigung, die metaphysische Opposition von Sache und Abbildung, Idealität und Realität zersetzen und in ein unaufhörliches Verweisen verwandeln” (2006, 93–94, orig. emphasis). 216 “So etwa erschöpfen sich Kafkas Texte nicht in der ausweglosen Bewegung des ‘paradoxen Zirkels’, die Jürgen Kobs an ihnen feststellt, sondern machen sich die Denkform des Paradoxes für eine kritische Reflexion auf die Möglichkeit von Erkennen und Verstehen zunutze” (Kienlechner 1981, 12). 217 See, e.g., Kessler (1983), Schenk (2005), Alt (1985), Thorlby (1987). 218 “Im Zentrum der Texte Kafkas, Hofmannsthals, Döblins und anderer Autoren dieser Zeit steht die Beziehung von Sprache, ihren abstrahierenden Formen und Realität. Begriffliches Denken gewinnt vorrangig Funktion und Bedeutung in der sprachlich ordnenden Erfassung von Welt und Wirklichkeit. Wo jedoch durch ‘Sprachoperationen’ eine autonome ‘Realität’ geschaffen wird, die mit der Wirklichkeit weder korrespondiert noch deren Ordnungen zu erfassen vermag, gewinnt Sprache ‘tautologischen’ Charakter, verweist nur mehr auf sich selbst, ohne noch die komplexen Strukturen einer Realität greifen zu können, die mehr und mehr ‘entgleitet’” (Kessler 1983, 8).

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Kafkaesque: the name has even entered the English language. What does the word mean, how is it used? Behind this question lurks the vaster one of how, or to what, any word relates; and I shall argue that the difficulties and dangers which arise when we try to answer it, are what is Kafkaesque. (Thorlby 1987, 31)219

Alt (1985), for his part, describes Kafka’s literature in terms of a “duplicity” (“doppelte Schreibweise”), which is structurally equivalent to Kienlechner’s hypothesis of “negativity” and withdrawal. Camus’s, Kienlechner’s and Alt’s hypotheses have indeed a similar shape structurally. They identify two contrary dimensions (Camus: meaning and absurdity; Kienlechner: truth and negativity; Alt: despair about language and celebration of language), which paradoxically both exclude each other and rely on each other. According to Alt, Kafka’s texts deplore the unbridgeable gap between reality and language, but only on a first level of meaning. On a higher level, Kafka’s texts contradict this lamentation by using it productively, as an occasion to continue the writing process. As Alt argues, this “doubled scripture” is designed to showcase an undisguised despair about the impotence of language, while the artfulness by which Kafka writes about it simultaneously contradicts this despair.220 Lehmann’s (2006) conception of Kafka’s poetics overlaps in this regard with Alt’s analysis. As Lehmann argues, Kafka’s scripture both withdraws reference and showcases this withdrawal. Lehmann, however, goes one step further than Alt as he concludes that the revelation of the mechanism of referential withdrawal highlights in the upshot the tangible dimension of scripture, such as the letters on the paper.221 This hypothesis amounts, finally, to the claim of a radically self-referential meaning according to which the text is about itself.222 219 Interestingly, a similar point has been made by Villiger (2010, 73–74): “Das Adjektiv kafkaesk beschreibt präzise diesen Widerstand der Texte, indem es sich der Problematik durch Flucht in die Tautologie zu entziehen sucht.” 220 “Im Schatten der thematisch werdenden Sprachskepsis erfolgt derart eine Annäherung an individuelle Ausdrucksweisen und Varianten des Schreibens, zeichnet sich eine doppelte Schrift ab, die vordergründig ihre eigene Unmöglichkeit beklagt und auf einer höheren Ebene diese Klage durchstreicht, indem sie sie als bloßen Anlaß für ihr Fortschreiten begreift. Die doppelte Schrift will den Eindruck unmittelbarer Verzweiflung über sich selbst erwecken, aber sie ist zugleich eine kunstvolle Inszenierung solcher Spontaneität unter dem Mantel der Sprachnot” (Alt 1985, 457). 221 “Zwei Momente werden deutlich: einerseits wird in Kafkas Schreiben der reale Bezug der Zeichen kunstvoll entzogen, wobei dieser Entzug gleichzeitig inszeniert wird. Zum anderen kann die buchstäbliche Realität des Geschriebenen, die Buchstaben auf dem Papier, zu einer intensiven Eigenrealität avancieren. Diese Erfahrung einer Körperlichkeit der Buchstaben ist eines der wichtigen Motive des Selbstbezugs in Kafkas Texten” (Lehmann 2006, 90). 222 “Lesen wir aber den Text als Darstellung seiner selbst, so erschließt sich seine Kohärenz” (Lehmann 2006, 99).

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Villliger (2010, 76), by contrast, cautions (legitimately, in my view) against such an interpretation as an allegorisation according to which Kafka’s texts would be about textuality or scripture. Kafka’s texts thus seem to contain somehow the idea of language-scepticism, but in a way that is hard to pin down. While Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, for instance, describes explicitly his despair, his loss of the ability to think and talk about things in a coherent way, K. makes no such explicit assertions. This is an important difference. But how does the novel showcase its mistrust in language then? I consider the crisis of representation to rely largely on the techniques of narrative withdrawal analysed above that make readers experience the shortcomings and deficiencies of language (that is, the gap between words and reality). Instead of making the crisis of representation a subject matter, Kafka creates a crisis of representation in the mind of the reader who can literally not represent the narrative reality. This is what I call (with a side glance to my distinction between representationalist and performative narrativity223) Kafka’s performativity. Instead of representing language scepticism as an idea, Kafka’s text performs a crisis of representation.224 The textual structures trigger a mental performance in readers whose effects are problems (i.e. a crisis) of representation. In this regard, Kafka’s novel equals a complex assemblage of carefully arranged stage directions that readers are prompted to perform in their minds. While the heavy concept of the “crisis of representation” may seem to be more or less incompatible with the idea of playfulness, these two aspects are closely intertwined in Kafka’s poetics. If (as I have argued above) Kafka’s despair about the “absurd” human condition, the withdrawal of “truth” and the deficiency of language frees him, to a certain extent, from the burden of (“truthful”) representation, the way is paved not only for narrative performativity, but also for freely playing with language. Indeed, the overwhelming richness of language structures can be imagined as a vast linguistic playground that invites Kafka to various language games.

5.5.3 Language games: Kafka’s “logic of signifiers” One aspect of Kafka’s language games has gained special attention, called alternatively “strategies of demetaphorisation” (Liebrand 2004, 80), “concretistic

223 See section 2.3.6. 224 As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits” (1986, 23, orig. emphasis deleted).

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poetics” (Villiger 2010) or “logic of signifiers” (Liebrand 2006, 9).225 These three notions seek to describe basically a similar kind of language game; consequentially, they overlap in many points. This branch of research analyses ways in which Kafka turns linguistic structures (e.g. proverbs, metaphors, phonetic similarities) into narrative devices, thereby shedding new light on Kafka’s narrativity in general and on Das Schloss in particular. I will provide a quick overview on this branch of research, argue for its pertinence for Kafka’s last novelistic fragment and elaborate on some of the language games that can be found in this text. Strategies of demetaphorisation can be understood as techniques by which Kafka “slides between figurative and literal meaning” (see Liebrand 2004, 83).226 In other words, Kafka’s texts take metaphorical meanings literally, translating them back into concrete pictures or narrative contents. This can be understood as a strategy of demetaphorisation. A simple example for this technique can be found in the following episode. K. asks Frieda whether she knows Klamm. Frieda answers with a counter question: “‘Wollen Sie Herrn Klamm sehn?’ K. bat darum” (S, 60).227 At this point readers will be full of hope. It seems as if K. will soon meet Klamm and get perhaps some answers from him. This expectation, however, is not fulfilled: Sie zeigte auf eine Tür, gleich links neben sich. “Hier ist ein kleines Guckloch, hier können Sie durchsehen.” [. . .] Durch das kleine Loch, das offenbar zu Beobachtungszwecken gebohrt war, übersah er fast das ganze Nebenzimmer. An einem Schreibtisch in der Mitte des Zimmers [. . .] saß [. . .] Herr Klamm. (S, 60)228

225 Here and hereafter translations mine. Hutchinson (2011) identifies a further kind of language game in Kafka’s literature, namely “cryptic play with particular letters of the alphabet” (2011, 297). For further bibliographical references to approaches that are concerned with Kafka’s use of language, see Hutchinson (2011, 297, note 2). 226 Such strategies have been highlighted inter alia by Anders (1951), Beicken (1974, 122), Thorlby (1987), Liebrand (2004) and Villiger (2010). There is, as Thorlby (1987, 35) puts it, a “confusing play with the distinction between literal and metaphorical language [. . .]. In his prose, you cannot tell what is literal and what metaphorical; the two blur, you can no longer be sure what each is nor of the relationship between them.” 227 “‘Would you like to see Herr Klamm?’ K. begged for [it]” (CA-M, 38). I have replaced the translation of “darum”, translated by the W. and E. Muir as “a sight of him”, by “it”, which is closer to the original and does not destroy the surprise created by what follows. 228 “She pointed to a door just on her left. ‘There’s a little peephole there, you can look through’. [. . .] K. overlooked almost the whole neighbouring room, watching through the little hole which had obviously been bored for spying through, and commanded almost the whole of the neighbouring room. At a desk in the middle of the room [. . .] sat Herr Klamm” [(CA-M, 38)].

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Obviously, Kafka ironises the readers’ quasi-automatic metaphorisation of the verb “to see” by reducing it, surprisingly, to its literal sense: seeing Klamm does not mean to make his acquaintance, but simply to observe him for a short moment. The more surprised readers are from this plot development, the more they will be astonished by a later comment by the landlady according to which K. is not capable of seeing Klamm at all (“Sie sind ja gar nicht imstande Klamm wirklich zu sehen [. . .]”, S, 80). How should one make sense of this plain contradiction? The devil is, as always, in the detail. Indeed, the passage quoted above does not say that K. sees something – only that he “übersah” almost the entire adjacent room, which is indeed an ambiguous statement, since übersehen means not only “to survey”, but also “to overlook” something.229 According to Liebrand (2004), Kafka borrows his strategy of demetaphorisation from Kleist. Liebrand analyses inter alia the various ways in which Kafka plays with imagery in The Trial and in which he concretises and literalises linguistic structures. Leni’s webbing between the digits, for instance, concretises her virginity, representing a kind of replaced hymen; K.’s entrance into Fräulein Bürstner’s Frauenzimmer can be read, with regard to the ambiguity of the word Frauenzimmer (which can mean both a woman’s boudoir and the woman herself) as a narrative-metaphorical concretisation of the act of sexual penetration. Moreover, Liebrand shows how Kafka concretises concepts that metaphorically contain the idea of “falling” (Sündenfall, Gerichtsfall, Überfall, etc.). As Villiger argues, blurring the boundaries between metaphorical and literal language use has a severe consequence: the language loses its referential function.230 Liebrand’s examples raise, however, the question of whether Kafka’s language use is sufficiently described by the idea of de-/metaphorisation. Consider the example of Leni’s “hymen”. The connection between the hymen and virginity is not only a biological one, but also a cultural one insofar as the hymen is an important element of cultural practices and discourses. Insofar as these cultural meanings can (inversely) be said to be attached to the biological concept of the hymen, the hymen itself can be considered a cultural metaphor. The technique by which Kafka exploits the concept has therefore two sides. On the

229 Some sentences later, the verb “to see” is used again – in a way that indicates indeed a perceptual deficiency on K.’s part: “da die Randleiste des Tisches hoch war, konnte K. nicht genau sehn, ob dort irgendwelche Schriften lagen, es schien ihm aber, als wäre er leer” (S, 61). 230 “Was Kafka durch die Verwörtlichung der Sprache betreibt, ist ein experimentelles Unterlaufen und Verwischen der Trennung von wörtlicher und metaphorischer Rede, ein Sprechen, das sich auf verschiedenen Ebenen gleichzeitig bewegt und damit auch den Verlust der Bezeichnungsfunktion der Sprache nach sich zieht” (Villiger 2010, 78). See also Lehmann (2006).

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one hand, he demetaphorises the hymen by replacing it by a biological-animal equivalent (a webbing between the digits), which has no cultural-metaphorical meaning; on the other hand, he incites readers to re-metaphorise the demetaphorised webbing/hymen since, as soon as readers discover the partial (pictorial) similarity between the two organs, they are likely to ascribe the metaphorical meaning of the hymen to the non-metaphorical webbing. Briefly, Kafka does not content himself with simple, one-way translations, but creates complex dynamics of semantic transferrals and of de- and remetaphorisations. The subtlety of Kafka’s language games is thus perhaps not sufficiently well described as a “strategy of demetaphorisation”. Villiger (2010) makes an effort to contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of Kafka’s language games (which in his view should not be mistaken for simple puns, see Villiger 2010, 76): Dieses Wörtlich-Nehmen der Sprache beschränkt sich dabei wohl nicht auf die Rekonkretisierung von Metaphern und idiomatischen Wendungen. Ebenso spielt die Etymologie eine Rolle, dazu kommen Klang-, Buchstaben- und andere Wortspiele. (Villiger 2010, 78)231

According to Villiger, Kafka’s texts are governed by a “concretistic poetics” according to which they (i) take (i.e. narrate) proverbs literally, (ii) search for homonyms or phonetically related words and make them influence the plot; furthermore, his texts (iii) use particular words as a pattern, which provides entire narratives with contents and structures. Das Schloss provides many examples of this poetics insofar as it activates several homonymical meanings. As Villiger (2010, 81–87) observes, a Schloss denotes, in German, both a castle and a lock. Together with the root of the corresponding verb schließen (to close, to lock), the word Schloss activates a vast network of lexical items and meanings, which can all be found in the novel: K. cannot enter the castle; the latter is thus locked to him (the castle is verschlossen) and in the village, K. is an outsider (ausgeschlossen: excluded from the community). Moreover, according to Villiger, there is a claustrophobic atmosphere in the village, which conveys a feeling of being locked-in (eingeschlossen). In my eyes, there are even more important homonymic meanings to discover that the novel exploits extensively, namely (auf/aus etwas) schließen or (etwas) erschließen (inferring, deducing something from something). K.’s main

231 “This strategy of taking language literally is apparently not restricted to the reconcretisation of metaphors and idioms. Etymology plays a role as well, completed by phonetic games, games with letters as well as other puns” (translation mine).

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activity (and that of the other characters) consists of repeated attempts to deduce something from what the others tell him, to make inferences that allow him to understand the rules that govern the village and the castle. Considered from this perspective, already the title of the novel alludes indirectly to what it is ultimately about: inferring, deducing, efforts of making sense. Moreover, K. considers some other characters (Barnabas, Frieda) as “keys” whose “use” could allow him to reach (i.e. to “open up”) the castle. Additionally, K.’s repeated attempts reveal his Entschlossenheit (determinedness), which contrasts sharply with the Unentschlossenheit (undecisiveness) of the castle authorities (whose possibility K. is said to take hardly into consideration).232 Playful examples of this kind are abundant. I would like to add, however, that they are often not that obvious because the associated homonymic meanings are not always made explicit. Instead, they are subliminally present in the subsequent events. Consider, for instance, K.’s conversation with the Vorsteher. K. gains the impression that the Verkehr (“dealings”) with the castle authorities is easy233– only to learn, shortly afterwards, that everything is verkehrt (wrong, upside down, disorganised) in the way the castle authorities are working.234 Insofar as the novel does not use the word “verkehrt”, it can be understood as an implicit variant of the figura etymologica according to which etymological derivations guide intradiegetic happenings. This language game is extended, in the present example, by the context, which activates the sexual meaning of the word Verkehr.235 There is also a play with ambiguities in this passage where Pepi describes K.’s arrival: Und mit allen diesen besondern Ansprüchen plumpst er gleich am ersten Abend in die gröbste Falle. Schämt er sich denn nicht? Was hat ihn denn an Frieda so bestochen? [. . .] (S, 466) Hat sie ihm denn wirklich gefallen können, dieses magere gelbliche Ding?236

232 “Den einer solchen Behörde gegenüber wahnwitzigen Gedanken, daß hier Unentschlossenheit mitgewirkt habe, streifte K. kaum” (S, 41–42). 233 “Wieder hatte er das Gefühl der außerordentlichen Leichtigkeit des Verkehrs mit den Behörden” (S, 94–95). 234 “Ob es Kontrollbehörden gibt? Es gibt nur Kontrollbehörden!” (S, 104). 235 “Nirgends noch hatte K. Amt und Leben so verflochten gesehen wie hier, so verflochten, daß es manchmal scheinen konnte, Amt und Leben hätten ihre Plätze gewechselt. Was bedeutete z.B. die bis jetzt nur formelle Macht welche Klamm über K.’s Dienst ausübte, verglichen mit der Macht die Klamm in K.’s Schlafkammer in aller Wirklichkeit hatte” (S, 94). Moreover the Superintendant receives K. shortly afterwards in bed (just like Bürgel later on). 236 “And then with all these special demands of his, on that very first evening he goes and falls with a thud into the crudest trap. So is he not ashamed of himself? Well, what was it about Frieda that won him over? [. . .] Had she really succeeded in pleasing him, this yellowish little creature?” (CA-H, 297).

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The verb plumpsen is semantically similar to the verb fallen from which Kafka derives not only the Falle (trap) into which K. “falls”, but also Pepi’s interest in the question to know how Frieda could gefallen (be attractive for) K. Moreover, Pepi later elaborates on the idea of Frieda’s “trap”. She describes Frieda metaphorically as a “spider” whose “connections” (Verbindungen) – or whose trap: the spider web – everyone ignores.237 While K. seems to conceptualise Frieda’s connections, from his egoistic point of view, as a pathway that he could use in order to reach the castle, Pepi’s metaphor overwrites K.’s conceptualisation, presenting Frieda’s connections as dangerous, sticky strings of spider silk, which will prevent K. from getting anywhere, from making any progress. The picture of an insect, battling for its existence until exhaustion in a sticky web, has indeed at least one important overlap with the way Kafka has projected the ending of the novel: K.’s dying from exhaustion.238 Moreover, Pepi’s metaphor could possibly provide another narrative detail with meaning: Barnabas’s cloths make a “silky” impression on K. – should this detail suggest that he is part of Frieda’s silky spider web?239 As this exemplary analysis shows, Kafka’s language games are much more than punctual de-metaphorisations. Linguistic structures (homonyms, synonyms, etymological derivations) and the imagery associated with them increase the number of “paradigmatic” narrative connections between (even extremely dispersed) parts of the story. They thereby contribute significantly to an increase in interpretative possibilities. In other (more metaphoric) words: Kafka’s language games tempt us to enter deeper and deeper into his interpretative rhizome.240 It should not be overlooked, however, that language games serve, as Villiger has pointed out, also as a motor for the plot; they contribute to the development of the story. I would like to give a very simple, micro-level example, provided by the following short passage in which K., after reading a letter from Klamm, says to Barnabas: “‘Es ist ein Mißverständnis.’ Barnabas verstand ihn

237 “Aber sie hat, diese Spinne, Verbindungen, von denen niemand weiß” (S, 474). 238 The metaphor of an insect is of course also reminiscent of Die Verwandlung where K. literally becomes an insect. 239 “Er war fast weiß gekleidet, das Kleid war wohl nicht aus Seide, es war ein Winterkleid wie alle andern, aber die Zartheit und Feierlichkeit eines Seidenkleides hatte es” (S, 38). Admittedly, the idea of solemnity, with which K. associates the silkily shining cloths in this passage, does not fit well to the spider. 240 Villiger uses a different metaphor than I (namely a metaphor of interpretative entrapment or entanglement) to describe obviously the same insight: “Eine Annäherung an ‘Wahrheit’ scheint bei diesem Autor nur in der Verstrickung in solche unlösbaren Strukturen möglich zu sein” (Villiger 2010, 87).

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nicht.” (S, 187–188).241 Barnabas does not fail to understand K. because K. would have expressed himself unintelligibly. It is apparently the word Mißverständnis (misunderstanding) itself that creates – magically – a Mißverständnis on the story level.242 K. does thus not express or represent verbally the impression that there is a misunderstanding; his words have the magical power of making something become real, thereby influencing the diegetic happenings and the narrative development of the novel.243 Another example for the way in which language drives the development of the plot, combined with a pun, based on the play with synonyms, is the following excuse of Lasemann: “‘Ihr wundert Euch wahrscheinlich über die geringe Gastfreundlichkeit [. . .] aber Gastfreundlichkeit ist bei uns nicht Sitte, wir brauchen keine Gäste’” (S, 24).244 In this example, Kafka plays with the synonymy of the nouns Sitte and Brauch (custom). Brauch (custom) is transformed into the verb brauchen (to need) and then conceptually (re)connected with Sitte inasmuch as Lasemann suggests that customs (Sitten) depend on what one needs (brauchen). Kafka then uses this linguistic association for the plot. K. is not at all familiar with the rules and “customs” that govern the village, which is why he is perceived and treated like a stranger. But the connection between custom and need could be a chance for him to be integrated into the community; he only has to prove that the villagers (or the castle) need him. This is indeed K.’s strategy: “‘Gewiß’, sagte K., ‘wozu brauchtet Ihr Gäste. Aber hie und da braucht man doch einen, z. B. mich, den Landvermesser’” (S, 24–25).245

241 “This is a misunderstanding’. Barnabas did not understand” (translation mine; W. and E. Muir’s translation uses the past perfect, which conceals the language game in question here; see CA-M, 120). 242 Deleuze and Guattari identify a similar mechanism: “it is not the law that is stated because of the demands of a hidden transcendence; it is almost the exact opposite: it is the statement, the enunciation, that constructs the law in the name of an immanent power of the one who enounces it” (1968, 45, orig. emphasis). 243 Moreover, insofar as the various kinds of Mißverständnis, created by the novel, are the central devices by which specific “Kafkaesque” effects of withdrawal and coherence in progress are brought about, K.’s choice of words has a metaleptic dimension. Not only does K.’s magical utterance of the word Mißverständnis create his misunderstanding of the letter and Barnabas’s misunderstanding of his utterance, but it alludes also to the novelistic poetics of withdrawal. 244 “‘You’re probably surprised at our lack of hospitality, [. . .] but hospitality is not our custom here, we have no use for visitors’” (CA-M, 14). Lasemann’s comment could very well be read metaleptically since the feeling of discomfort that readers experience as they read through Kafka’s inconsistencies can be interpreted as a lack of authorial, reader-oriented “hospitality”. Kafka does not write for readers, for “strangers”, but for himself. 245 “‘To be sure,’ said K., ‘what use would you have for visitors? But still you need one now and then, me, for example, the Land Surveyor’” (CA-M, 15).

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Briefly, not only characters have agency in Kafka’s narratives. Language itself shapes the narrative structure, action and emplotment.246 This reveals a new dimension of what I have proposed to call Kafka’s performativity247: Kafka’s language refuses to serve as a container for a preconceived story, that is, to stage a preconceived narrative scenario; instead, it uses its own richness in order to influence the story. The narrative thereby engenders248 (and denotes) itself. An important question arises with this insight. According to my basic hypothesis, Kafka’s narrativity lives through the withdrawal of consistency – that is, by the lack of a system (be it a narrative or an interpretative schema) that would unify the richness of detail, providing it with coherence. Does the logic of language, which secretly drives Kafka’s narrative, not represent a hidden, subliminal system of coherence? In other words, is the “narrative” logic of action replaced by a “linguistic” logic? Liebrand (2006, 9), for instance, speaks about Kafka’s concretistic poetics as a “logic of signifiers” (Signifikantenlogik). This concept is an adequate way of conceptualising Kafka’s language games insofar as it highlights the fact that language and its network of signifiers represent indeed a system of coherence (i.e. a linguistic order or logic), which provides Kafka’s works with an otherwise lacking logic. I would thus answer the first question in the affirmative. Language structures provide a kind of alternative system of coherence, that is, a “key” for “understanding” the functioning of Kafka’s Schloss inasmuch as they (retrospectively!) lay bare a causality inherent in the progression and contents of the plot, which cannot be detected by traditional “narrative” logic (in terms of a representation of intentions, agency, eventfulness etc.). Does this subliminal linguistic system of coherence devaluate my fundamental hypothesis according to which Kafka’s narrativity lives by the withdrawal of consistency and meaning (and by consequent readerly activities of

246 Villiger defends the same position: “‘Poetik der Wörtlichkeit’ meint [. . .], dass Kafkas Texte sich nicht nur sprachreflexiv verhalten, sondern sich von in der Sprache Vorgefundenem herschreiben, Sprachbilder und Sprachstrukturen ausstellen und (zumindest teilweise) ganze Erzählungen daraus entwickeln” (2010: 76, orig. emphasis). 247 Villiger also draws on the notion of performativity in order to describe the functioning of Kafka’s short story “Der Kreisel“: “Nur zum Schein erzählt dieser Text von einem Moment der Erkenntnis, tatsächlich tut er nichts anderes als eine sprachliche Wendung performativ immer erneut zu inszenieren und das Prinzip des Vergleichens ins Leere laufen zu lassen. Diesem performativen Selbstbezug ist es geschuldet, dass man auch in der Beschreibung des Textes fast unweigerlich auf die vom Text selbst vorgeschlagene Metaphorik zurückgreift und solcherart eine Grenze der Übersetzbarkeit beschreibt” (Villiger 2010, 81). 248 “Der Text zeugt sich aus sich selber hervor durch Erinnerung und spielerische Variation des eigenen Wortmaterials” (Villiger 2010, 93).

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coherence in progress)? I do not think so for two reasons. Firstly, the “logic of signifiers” is not exposed by the text. As a source of coherence, it is hidden in and concealed by the plot, such that readers do have to engage in various processes of coherence in progress in order to discover connections between the emplotment and linguistic orders at all. Secondly, the existence of this subliminal linguistic coherence does not undo the various inconsistencies and techniques of narrative withdrawal analysed above. Interpretative problems and sense-making activities are stimulated on various levels of The Castle, even if one takes the “logic of signifiers” into account. While purely linguistic orders can be said to influence and stimulate the development of the plot in a somehow “coherent” (albeit unforeseeable) way, this generative logic of the story does not suppress the reader’s (constantly unfulfilled) urge for a story that “makes sense” in terms of narrative sequence, causality, intentionality and the like. The logic of signifiers cannot be but a rivalling logic, which cuts transversally across the syntagmatic order of emplotment. There is thus a rivalry, that is, an inconsistency between linguistic and narrative logic whose interpretative reconcilement requires, again, coherence in progress. It should be noted, however, that Kafka’s language games and the hidden “logic of signifiers” are, despite their playfulness, not a celebration of language. His language games testify, in a way, to Kafka’s language scepticism. One should not forget the extent to which Kafka rejects language: its “dry” allegories, flat metaphors, reductionist dichotomies and its illusion of mimetic and communicative power.249 Kafka’s language games mirror, in a way, his disappointment over the deficiency of language. I interpret them primarily as a sign of disrespect towards language. Inasmuch as language cannot accomplish what it should be able to (namely to express truth, to represent reality and to enable self-expression), Kafka literally makes fun of it, by playfully exploiting it and by infringing its rules and mechanisms. Kafka’s relationship to language seems therefore to be characterised simultaneously by two attitudes: both aggression and hedonism. Kafka attacks the structures and conventions of language out of bitter delusion, but at the same time, these attacks are the only thing in the world that can amuse, relieve and somehow satisfy him. Ironically, these both aggressive and joyful games must take place within the realm of language. There is no outside from which Kafka

249 As Thorlby (1987, 40) puts it: “Language covers existence with a familiar and comprehensible surface. Beneath this exterior, there lay for Kafka magnitudes infinitely vast and unspeakably dangerous.”

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could attack. This may be one of the reasons why Kafka has become a poet – and is today one of the most admired language artists in the world. But doesn’t his own success prove his language scepticism wrong? Does his fame not speak for the potency of language? The answer cannot be unambiguous. Yes, his language scepticism may have been wrong to the extent to which Kafka succeeds in creating in readers “Kafkaesque” feelings (see section 5.4.5) and thus in “encoding” his subjectivity in language, albeit in a performative mode. And: No, his language scepticism has not been wrong insofar as the “Kafkaesque”, understood as the specific performative effect that his texts have on readers, amounts to a difficulty of understanding, to an experience of misunderstanding and to an uncomfortable withdrawal of coherence and meaning. Such an effect is generally not a sign of “successful”250 verbal communication. But, at least, a sign of “literariness.”251 ⁂ In the present chapter, I have offered a narratological analysis of Kafka’s narrativity that deliberately attempts to bridge the gap between narratological approaches (both to narrativity in general and to Kafka in particular) and interpretative literature on Kafka. The necessity of bridging this gap has revealed itself in my summary of narratological analyses (in sections 5.2 und 5.3) since, despite the interesting and (for a large part) convincing analyses of Kafka’s narrative anomalies considering focalisation and emplotment, the specific, “Kafkaesque” quality of Das Schloss is not fully explored by these approaches. More helpful in this regard are interpretative approaches to Kafka, which highlight the abundance of contradictions, the combination of conceptual inversion and deflection (Neumann’s “sliding paradox”), “countermanding” speech acts and intradiegetic reinterpretations. The contribution of this chapter consists, on the one hand, of bridging this gap by exploring the connections between narratological and interpretative approaches. It does so, on the other hand, by identifying and analysing in detail an overarching narrative dynamic, which can be considered the common source of various textual techniques: narrative withdrawal. This dynamic is argued to operate at the text-reader nexus and to bring about the Kafkaesque

250 I am alluding here to the much-debated difference between “practical” language use, often conceptualised as a well-formed, effective way of communicating, and “literary” (or artful) language use, to which such principles are not easily applicable (see chapter 3). 251 For Shklovsky, “[t]he goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘enstrangement’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged” (2015, 162).

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quality of Das Schloss. According to my argument, narrative withdrawal covers a broad range of textual strategies (see section 5.4) that systematically withdraw conceptual consistency; it thereby disturbs smooth narrative processing and triggers processes of coherence in progress while simultaneously impeding their completion (i.e. the creation of resultative coherence and meaning). In other words, narrative withdrawal is an effective textual stratagem by which Kafka decoys readers into an endless interpretative burrow, thereby enclosing them on the stage of narrativity in actualisation. This analysis has the advantage of revealing the interconnections between various textual phenomena and their effects on readers, but it does not answer more fundamental, hermeneutic questions concerning the (intended? Implied?) meaning of the novel. If the consistency and meaning of the intradiegetic story is systematically withdrawn, one is tempted to ask: Why does Kafka withdraw consistency and meaning? What does the withdrawal of meaning mean? If one asks these questions, the search for the meaning of the intradiegetic story repeats itself, in a way, on a “higher” interpretative level (interpretative ascent, see section 6.4). I have been approaching these questions from three different angles in the last three subchapters (5.5–5.7). The first way of answering this question consists of illuminating the relationship between meaning and absurdity in Kafka’s work in general (section 5.5). I have identified a structural resemblance between different interpretative approaches (namely between those of Camus, Kienlechner, Alt and Lehmann), which lay bare a specific characteristic of Kafka’s texts: they escape binary oppositions, be it the opposition between meaning (or truth) and absurdity (or lie) or between affirmation and negation. Kafka’s work combines them in paradoxical, recursive, self-destructive and self-sustaining loops, since, if his work both affirms the negation and negates any affirmation, neither the former nor the latter are susceptible of catching Kafka’s “position” – if only because “position” is something static, which does not comply with the confusing dynamics by which his texts live. Asking for the “meaning” of narrative withdrawal appears, in the light of this “Kafkaesque” paradoxicality, to be the wrong question insofar as the question itself implies a conceptual dichotomy that is strange to (or rejected by) Kafka. A second possibility of answering the question “What is the meaning of narrative withdrawal?” has been discussed in section 5.6 with regard to the crisis of representation. Taking Kafka’s language scepticism and his techniques of withdrawal into account, one could say that “the meaning” of the novel (if one was coerced to use this unfortunate word) consists of its performativity; the text is designed not to represent, but to perform a crisis of representation, which realises itself, by means of narrative withdrawal, in the mind of the reader.

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Finally, the meaning question can be answered on the level of Kafka’s poetics. A detailed analysis of Kafka’s extremely subtle and implicit language games not only reveals that Kafka often replaces the logic of the plot by the logic of language, or that he subordinates the former under the latter, notably by letting linguistic synonyms, derivations or associations influence or guide intradiegetic developments. It also reveals the other, more positive side of the crisis of representation, namely the cheerful and playful exploitation of the richness of language (including the narrative discourse) and of its almost endless, “paradigmatic” network of connections. Insofar as this rhizomatic use of language withdraws narrative consistency, it partakes in narrative withdrawal and can be interpreted, on a poetological level, as simultaneously bitter and playful anti-representationalism.

6 “Narrative resistance”: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.3.1 6.3.2 6.3.3 6.3.4 6.4 6.4.1 6.4.2 6.4.3 6.5 6.5.1 6.5.2

Research review: Forms of resistance 508 Resistance as a narrative dynamic at the text-reader nexus 513 The slot of ‘tellability’: Rhizomatic aspects of Toussaint’s narrativity 518 The narratological concept of ‘tellability’ 519 ‘n-1’ 524 Resistant macro schemata and rhizomatic micro-connectivity 529 Semantic becomings 539 The slot of ‘function’: Toussaint’s strategy of reappropriation 546 On the diegetic level 546 On the level of narrative composition 553 The strategy of reappropriation 565 The slot of ‘literariness’: Strategies of reception 571 Form-content blends 574 The historical staircase of criticism: Interpretative ascents and descents 580

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, born in 1957, is a Belgian author, who lives and works in Brussels and in Corsica. His career as a novelist started in 1985 with the publication of his first novel, La Salle de bain, which has not only become a bestseller, but also provoked vast interest in the academic literary research community. nine further novels followed, all published at Minuit: Monsieur (1986), L’Appareil-photo (1989), La Réticence (1991), La Télévision (1997), the tetralogy Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009) and Nue (2013) as well as La Clé USB (2019).1 Besides these novels, Toussaint has published five other texts at Minuit, which, however, will not be examined here.2 Concerning Toussaint’s reception, it seems that, at least partly, Toussaint’s books bridge the gap between popular and high literature; some of his novels are bestsellers and he has won some prizes for his novelistic work.3 Despite these awards, there is, as I will explain in greater detail below,4 a discussion in

1 Since the chapter has been finished before the publication of this last novel, it will not be taken into consideration here. 2 Autoportrait (à l’étranger) (2000), a collection of autobiographical travel stories; La Mélancolie de Zidane (2006), which is a short text of 13 pages; L’Urgence et la Patience (2012), an essay on writing practice and experiences, Football (2015) as well as Made in China (2017), which is not a fictional narrative. 3 For Fuir, Toussaint has been awarded the ‘Prix Médicis’, one of the most important literary awards in France, and La Vérité sur Marie has won the ‘Prix Décembre’. 4 See section 6.5. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-007

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academia concerning the literary quality of Toussaint’s works as well as of other authors pertaining to the same “courant littéraire” (see Schoots 1997, Ch. 1). This literary current, in which Toussaint can be considered to partake, begins according to an academic consensus in the 1980s and marks a literary-historical caesura insofar as it inaugurates a new generation of novelists that seem to have emancipated themselves (to a certain degree) from the authority and theoretical hegemony of the Nouveau Roman, in search of new modes of expression. There are different headings that have been proposed for this “non-group”5 of authors. The two most commonly used expressions are, on the one hand, “romans impassibles” (“impassive novels”) – an expression that Jérôme Lindon, the editor of Minuit, picked up from a literary critic and used in an advertisement for the novels of Echenoz, Toussaint, Deville and Oster in 1989 (see Ammouche-Kremers 1994, 13; Asholt 1994, 3; Eberlen 2002). On the other hand, one also talks about “literary minimalism” or – with regard to the authors – about “minimalists” (see, for instance, Motte 1995, 1999; Schoots 1997; Dambre and Blanckeman 2012b). There is, however, an increasing awareness of the disadvantages or even arbitrariness of such etiquettes. Viart, for instance, holds that the scope of such etiquettes tends to be either too large (as in the case of impassibilité, which solely denotes the choice of a certain “tone”) or to cover far too heterogeneous criteria (as in the case of minimalisme) (see Viart 2001, 323). A decade later, Dambre and Blanckeman even refer to the term minimalism as a “conceptual failure” (2012a, 12) and see its use legitimised only by its heuristic dimension. “Rather than the notion, it is the debate that evolves around this notion that turns out to be fruitful” (Dambre and Blanckeman 2012a, 10, translation mine). However, the apparent need for classification or for catchphrases does not stop engendering always new terminological propositions, such as “roman nouveau” (Mecke 2000, 406; 2002) or “the extreme contemporary” (“l’extrême contemporain”, a term dropped by Michel Chaillou, see Viart and Vercier 2008, 20). The confusion concerning the terminological characterisation of the actual era of French prose is, however, a fruitful one, since each of these labels emphasises another striking aspect of a quantity of novels from this period: impassibilité refers, as Lindon himself has emphasised, to a narration that tends to avoid explicit expressions of emotions (see Bertho 1994, 16). Minimalisme can be said to refer, rather abstractly, to a “principal technique [. . .] of reduction: reduction of stage [ . . . .], of intrigue, of action [. . .] [or] reduction of narrative form” (Motte 1995, 751). Mecke’s roman nouveau is supposed to mark simultaneously the

5 ‘Non-group’ inasmuch as its extension (the question whom it in- and exludes) depends on the respective scholarly approach.

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proximity and the distance of these novels to the Nouveau Roman, but should also encode, rather pejoratively, the very idea of “recent appearance” (as opposed to that of “artistic inventiveness”, see Mecke 2000, 406, note 15; here and hereafter my translation). This label is therefore also associated with the dissent in academia about the artistic value of these novels. The ‘extreme contemporary’, finally, is supposed to call to our minds the literary confluence of cultural acquaintances in the prose of today, the epoch-spanning nature of this literature, its dialogues with the past, “son renouement avec le dépôt culturel des siècles et des civilisations”6 (Viart and Vercier 2008, 20). The plurality of headings proposed for this “new aesthetic period” (Viart and Vercier 2008, 8) thus lays bare a subjacent variety of dimensions deemed characteristic of their novels and important for their understanding. Hence, the persistent problem of defining a specific group of authors and of bringing them under a common thread testifies, as Viart notes, perhaps less to the incompetence of literary researchers than to the nature of the literature of today: “une littérature en ordre dispersé, où chacun fraie son chemin propre dans l’insouci sinon dans l’incuriosité de celui des autres”7 (Viart 2001, 323). Does it, in view of this already confusing plurality of terminological headings, make any sense to introduce yet again a new keyword into the debate by dropping, with regard to Toussaint, the term narrative resistance? Is this term really susceptible of catching any significant feature of Toussaint’s novels? And is it adequate to characterise the entire work of Toussaint by one label? These questions are important, since the problem of heterogeneity, as presented by Viart, also concerns the work of single authors, who, as they take new directions, produce novels that do not fit into the categories that described their earlier texts very well. Considering the characterisation of Toussaint as a minimalist, Stump, for instance, remarks: “I do not see how that label could legitimately be applied to Faire l’amour and Fuir, which are novels of a respectable length, rich and complex, full of descriptive detail and even of action” (Stump 2006, 98).8 If I analyse Toussaint’s narrativity in terms of “resistance”, it is primarily because the research literature frequently qualifies his prose by this term. Although researchers often draw on this same notion, they use it, however, to explore very different facets of Toussaint’s novels. One could deduce from this fact that resistance is simply a very versatile notion, susceptible of providing a

6 “[. . .] its references to the cultural depositary of centuries and civilisations” (translation mine). 7 “[. . .] a literature of scattered orders where everyone breaks his or her own way through, unconcerned by – if not disinterested in – the ways taken by others” (translation mine). 8 He adds, so as to confirm his position, that Toussaint himself considers this unpredictability of his narrative compositions to be “a vital element of his craft” (Stump 2006, 98).

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phenomenal diversity with a unitary conceptual shape.9 From my point of view, however, the frequency with which scholars refer (either explicitly or implicitly) to this notion points indeed to a fundamental quality of Toussaint’s narrativity – a quality that the present chapter seeks to explain by means of schema-theoretical analysis. As a key term, resistance points to an attitude of negation or negativity, which manifests itself in Toussaint’s novels in very different ways. While I will elaborate on the various facets of Toussaint’s resistance in greater detail below, I would like to present here at least fundamental aspects of and problems related to this literary phenomenon. One of the most obvious and most discussed aspects of Toussaint’s resistant narrativity consists of his negation of (or resistance against) common ways of storytelling. His novels present a narrator “who plays like a child with our serious expectations” (Adler 2016, 106, here and hereafter translation mine) and who is unable (or unwilling?) to tell a story “as is right and proper” inasmuch as he concentrates on the “insignificant” (106).10 This lack of narrative eventfulness11 is partly also due to the narrator protagonists12 who tend to isolate themselves, strive primarily for calm and meditativeness (see Demanze 2016) and refuse to partake in social life. A typical narrator protagonist of Toussaint’s novels passes his days mostly alone, enclosed in a bathroom (La salle de bain), for example, or hanging around in a park (La télévision). He does not manage to get a driver’s licence – not because he would be a bad driver, but because he fails to get together all documents for the application file (L’appareil-photo) and either he does not get his job done (La Télévision) or only feigns to work (Monsieur).13 He lives in his girlfriend’s parents’ house and when she leaves him, his inertia forces the parental couple to search for a new home for him (Monsieur). In other words, the typical narrator protagonist of Toussaint’s novels is a kind of “Spirit that denies” that lives by the negation of almost everyone and everything around him, rejects any kind of ambition and

9 This is the way in which Adler (2016), for instance, uses the term of “distraction” in order to describe Toussaint’s novelistic practices. 10 “Car le narrateur ne sait pas conduire une histoire comme il se doit; il se concentre sur l’insignifiant” (Adler 2016, 106). 11 “[. . .] il nous semble qu’à la notion matricielle de ‘transformation’ pour l’intrigue, ils [les romans de Toussaint, ESW] opposent une certaine forme de stagnation de l’histoire qui rend difficile le fait même de parler à leur sujet de progression de l’action dramatique” (Lemesle 1998, 116). 12 As Motte puts it, “the narrator’s renunciation of the world is figurative of Toussaint’s renunciation of traditionalist novelistic technique” (1995, 756). 13 Chaudier (2016b) elaborates on the problematic relationship of Toussaint’s protagonists to work.

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offers hardly anything in return to his readers.14 It seems as if Toussaint’s novels reject the basic requirement according to which novels and their protagonists have to offer their readers something. This basic negativity presents a considerable challenge even to professional readers. If they do not want to restrict themselves to stating this very negativity, if they want to get something out of these novels – something that is susceptible of providing either the novels or their interpretative performance with value –, they have to reverse Toussaint’s novelistic negativity interpretatively into something positive, such as an implicit philosophy or hidden truths that Toussaint has presumably concealed under his negativity. This is, for instance, the avenue of escape taken by Schmidt (2001; 2003a, b) who undertakes to read the “latent philosophical subtext” (2001, 18) of Toussaint’s novels, connecting them, in compliance with some explicit intertextual references, to the philosophies of Epicurus, Zeno of Elea and Pascal. The recently published anthology Les vérités de Jean-Philippe Toussaint (Chaudier 2016c) – the title is telling – reveals that philosophical interpretation is still one of the favourite ways of handling the problem of negativity. In the introduction, Chaudier (2016a) lists several “truths” that are argued to be traceable in Toussaint’s œuvre.15 The first truth amounts apparently to a kind of language scepticism since, according to Chaudier, the disparity between what the narrator says and does amounts to a warning against eloquence.16 Other philosophical truths detected by Chaudier concern human mortality (reality is time that flies)17 and thinking as a means of stabilising one’s identity.18 Many of the contributors to the volume also make an effort to find positive philosophical equivalents to the diverse facets of the inherent negativity of Toussaint’s novels. Adler (2016, 109–110), for instance, argues that the “distraction” of Toussaint’s protagonists, including their refusal to want or achieve something, teaches us to find “individual happiness” in the currently neglected far niente (2016, 109–110).19 Demanze (2016, 258), for his

14 Motte emphasises the “poverty and banality of the narrator’s experience” (1995, 757). 15 “Cette introduction aura atteint son but si elle parvient à persuader le lecteur que le mot apparemment aride de vérité et l’œuvre si vivante de Jean-Philippe Toussaint ne se regardent pas en travers, comme deux inconnus [. . .]” (Chaudier 2016a, 26). 16 “La première des vérités que nous rencontrons dans l’œuvre de Toussaint est donc critique: elle nous met en garde contre l’éloquence” (Chaudier 2016a, 19). 17 “[. . .] si la réalité nous inquiète autant, c’est qu’elle s’impose à nous sous les espèces du temps, c’est-à-dire une mobilité impossible à immobiliser” (Chaudier 2016a, 19). 18 “C’est donc par la pensée que s’atteste le mieux le sentiment irréductible d’être soi” (Chaudier 2016a, 22). 19 “[. . .] la rêverie est [. . .] le lieu d’expression d’un bonheur individuel [. . .]” (Adler 2016, 109). “Ni patricien, ni plébéien, le personnage des romans de Toussaint n’a pas de statut social défini,

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part, who concentrates on the texts’ resistance against the revelation of the protagonists’ inner life, argues – inter alia – that the characters’ empty, non-referential dreamy meditativeness can be traced back to an ideal of happiness that is bound to non-verbal mental flows, which are possible only outside of the immobile grids of language.20 What lurks behind this interpretative hypothesis is the assumption that the protagonists experience a kind of a crisis of representation, hidden behind their negativity (negativity referring, in this context, to the narrator’s resistance against providing the protagonists’ persistent meditations with concrete mental contents).21 Such interpretations allow to provide many facets of Toussaint’s prose with reasonable contemporary interpretative meanings (that is, with a kind of ‘positivity’). Nonetheless, from my point of view, there is something profoundly dissatisfying in this way of approaching Toussaint’s novels, and part of this dissatisfaction is due to Toussaint’s novels themselves, which somehow determine or necessitate such kinds of interpretation. First of all, the “truths” that are argued to be encoded in Toussaint’s narratives do not exactly impress in terms of thematic literary innovation22 and philosophical substance. One could reply that this is not even necessary, insofar as literary value is not necessarily measured in terms of philosophical originality. While this is true, I would like to point to a criterion that is generally considered to be important in terms of literary value, namely the interplay and interweaving of literary form and meaning; that is, the ways in which meanings are implied by (or emerge from) the overall composition of a complex literary work of art. It seems to me that, in this regard, Toussaint’s prose (and, subsequently, many of its interpretations) offers very little: neither the contents nor the narrative forms are susceptible, from my point of view, of triggering by themselves very complex processes of

pas de passé certain ni ambition pour l’avenir, c’est aussi dire qu’il peut être n’importe qui. C’est réaffirmer aussi que n’importe qui a droit de spéculer sur l’insignifiant [. . .] pour faire droit au far niente [. . .]. Tel semble être la quête des personnages et l’ambition des romans distraits de JeanPhilippe Toussaint: non pas nous faire rêver en renouant avec la grande veine des aventures romanesques d’antan, mais nous ouvrir des espaces de rêverie dans un quotidien régi par les logiques de performance” (Adler 2016, 109–110). 20 As Demanze explains with regard to a sentence of La salle de bain: “je me rendais compte qu’au final il s’agissait [. . .] de mettre en avant le plaisir spécifique que la pensée rêveuse suscitait dès lors qu’elle ne devait pas passer par les fourches caudines de la langue” (2016, 258). 21 Also Schmidt (2001, 74–76) emphasises the fact that the resistance against concrete mental contents – Schmidt’s refers to it as “abstractness” – represents an ideal of the protagonists. 22 For example, as we have seen in chapter 5, language scepticism already characterises – in my eyes, in a much more demanding and masterful way – Kafka’s literature.

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coherence in progress. It seems to me that researchers tend to counterbalance23 this lack of verbal artistry and formal complexity by mapping philosophical, but also literary-historical or poetological messages on the (in its simplicity ‘resistant’) narrative forms and contents of the novels. While these contents are mostly quite convincingly argued to play a role in the respective novels, it should be noted that they are nonetheless not necessarily implied24 by the formal composition of the novels. At least the philosophical “truths” or preoccupations stem in many cases from the commentaries and reflections of the narrator characters, i.e., from explicit statements that can be found on the level of narrative discourse.25 Consequently, interpreters of Toussaint’s prose tend to elaborate (often on the very same)26 utterances and behaviours of the narrator, or they tend to follow the intertextual or philosophical allusions made by him. Elaborating on these utterances, scholars present Toussaint’s novels as a rather “unnovelistic”27 depository of philosophical thoughts or “truths”, which inhere, at least in nuce, in the reflections of the narrator protagonist.28 This is unfortunate in four regards: (i) from a narratological point of view, the narrativity of Toussaint’s novels, for which the paratextual level vouches, is being marginalised, if not denied; (ii) from a properly philosophical point of view, the “truths” are disappointing in terms of philosophical substance; (iii) from a literary-scholarly point of view, the interpretations are not mind-blowing, because they do not lay bare implied meanings, but build on suggestive passages from the narratorial discourse; and (iv) from a literary-critical point of view, Toussaint’s novels fail to impress

23 I elaborate on this form of interpretative counterbalancing or “repairing” in section 6.5.2 under the heading of “interpretative ascent”. It is, however, not always easy to decide when such an interpretative ascent is justified and when it is not. 24 I am alluding to Beardsley’s conception idea of literariness according to which “a literary work is a discourse in which an important part of the meaning is implicit” (1981, 126). 25 The story level hardly plays a role in philosophical interpretations, precisely because Toussaint’s negativity, his resistance against eventfulness and practices of storytelling, offers too little. 26 I think, for instance, about the metaphor of the olive, which the narrator of L’Appareilphoto invokes in order to conceptualise his relationship to reality and to which scholars refer frequently. 27 Chaudier (2016b, 246) qualifies Toussaint’s novels as being governed by a deliberately nonnovelistic poetics (“poétique délibérément non romanesque”). 28 Demanze (2016b, 253) calls Toussaint’s novels not by chance “traités de meditation”. This hints at an imbalance concerning the importance of the levels of story and discourse (which are nonetheless closely intertwined, due to the autodiegetic narrator): the discourse prevails over the story by providing the latter, at least partly, with more or less philosophical, interpretative comments. Literary criticism, however, should be able to reach beyond the narrator’s discourse; this is, however, not always the case.

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because their value appears to reside almost exclusively in the existential fears, reflections and preoccupations of their protagonists, while sophisticated narrative compositionality seems to be refused, and with it the production of complex, implied narrative meanings by means of an interesting interplay of forms and functions. How then can these resistant, “negative” novels be approached in a more gratifying way? How can one deal with their negativity and resistances, if one neither wants to simply repeat or expand the narrators’ reflections nor to treat the narratives as mere repositories of mediocre philosophical concerns? First of all, it is important, from my point of view, not to try to “repair” or to counterbalance the novels’ negativity in order to find something positive, interpretable, valuable. What I propose to do instead is to accept and study the novels as they are. Therefore – and because the present study seeks to conduct research in the specific constitution of different narrativities –, this chapter will work towards an understanding of “resistance” as a fundamental feature of Toussaint’s novels. I will thus start, in section 6.1, with a review on the ways in which previous research has characterised Toussaint’s novels, thereby substantiating and concretising my claim of a fundamental “resistance” of Toussaint’s narratives. Resistance will thereby emerge as the central feature of Toussaint’s narrativity. The question that naturally arises at this point, especially with regard to the focus that at present lies on the dynamic core of narrativity (that is, on processes of coherence in progress, which take place at the nexus of text, reader and contexts),29 is to know how the dynamic of narrative resistance operates from a narratological point of view. Which processes are constitutive for this phenomenon? How does Toussaint achieve to create these effects of negativity? In which way do the novels impede or defer the creation of resultative coherence? In section 6.2, I will be using schema theory in order to provide a rough, heuristic sketch of the dynamic of narrative resistance, that is, of the ways in which Toussaint’s novels hold readers in a stage of coherence in progress. The following chapters, in which also the theory of blending will play a role, will make use of this heuristic concept of narrative resistance in order to explore different facets of Toussaint’s narrativity. Scholars have frequently conceptualised Toussaint’s resistance in terms of a lack of novelistic qualities, noting that something fundamentally narrative seems to be lacking in these texts. Section 6.3 argues that this impression has to do with tellability. Tellability is a narratological concept that draws on the expectation of the reader that, if something is narrated, it is because it is “worth telling” or “has a point”; it is thus an important ingredient of narratives or, schema- theoretically

29 I refer to the stage of narrativity in actualisation, see chapters 2 and 3.

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speaking, an important “slot” of the schema NARRATIVE (or NARRATIVITY). Section 6.3 thus analyses Toussaint’s narrative resistance in terms of a poetological refusal to “fill” the slot of tellability. Section 6.4 identifies a further narrative strategy by which Toussaint disrupts smooth, coherence-based processing on the part of readers. As I have explained in chapter 3, reading narratives means generally that readers build up situation models (i.e. a mental construct) of the fictive world, inter alia by integrating the cognitive schemata activated by the text into a larger, spatio-temporal mental model. If this process is completed, resultative coherence and narrativity has been achieved. Section 6.4 argues that Toussaint disturbs the creation of such a narrative coherence by providing information that is inconsistent with the encyclopaedic schemata that the text itself activates. To be more precise, this inconsistency will be argued to have to do with the “function” slot of schemata. According to my analysis, Toussaint’s narrativity is characterised by a subversive use of schemata insofar as his narratives fill (i.e. narrate) the function slots in a way that contradicts the respective schemata. Inasmuch as the “use” or “function” presents a substantial part of certain schemata, the narrative refusal to create consistency between schemata and their function slots represents a threat to the coherence of the schema itself and to its processing. Section 6.4 will analyse resistances of this kind both on the intradiegetic level as well as on the level of narrative composition. Finally, I will maintain the interpretive hypothesis that this form of narrative negotiation can be understood as a strategy of ‘reappropriation’ – an idea that is applicable both to the literary-historical problem of narrating after modernity and the ‘Nouveau Roman’ (‘reappropriation’ rather than ‘return’ of narrative means) as well as under the conditions of ‘postmodern’ society. The third object of resistance, which will be analysed in section 6.5, concerns literariness. As we will see, Toussaint’s novels refuse to cohere with norms of literary quality. Nonetheless, evaluative responses concerning the aesthetic quality or value of literary narratives are inextricably intertwined with the coherence and narrativity of texts. Section 6.5 will therefore analyse the reception of Toussaint’s novels in the community of literary scholars and their ways of coming to terms with the resistance that these narratives oppose against literary processing. More precisely, this chapter analyses the means by which scholars try to make narrative elements fit into the slot of literariness by constructing forms of (resultative) coherence, especially by blending strategies. These reflections will necessitate a discussion of the related problem of narrative-literary “degrees” (and of the scholarly strategy of “interpretative ascent”).

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6.1 Research review: Forms of resistance Researchers have identified a broad range of “resistances” in Toussaint’s novels. In this review, I would like to take into consideration four domains or levels of narrative resistance: (i) the diegetic world, (ii) the level of narrative composition, (iii) the relation between literature and society and (iv) the level of literary-critical categorisation. Considering the (i) diegetic level,30 the idea of resistance has been frequently invoked to describe the behaviour of (some of) Toussaint’s protagonists in their respective storyworlds. Considering La Réticence, Caldwell, for instance, notes: “Reticence, indeed: he [the protagonist, ESW] resists explaining even to himself why he has taken the letters, why he has come to Sasuelo” (Caldwell 1995, 379). With regard to L’Appareil-photo, Keidel maintains that, on the one hand, the protagonist “resists” reality, but that, on the other, reality also opposes a certain “resistance” to the protagonist’s attempts to exhaust reality (as in the always-invoked scene with the olive, kneaded by the protagonist with a fork) (see Keidel 2009, 127). Schmidt (2003a) states, more generally, that the Toussaintian human being is a subversive persiflage on present ethical standards. According to Schmidt, the subjacent philosophy of Toussaint’s texts aims at an art of living that actualises ideas and practices of Epicurus, Zeno of Elea, of Zen and stoicism and stands against entertainment and consumerism. Schmidt interprets these philosophical subtexts as a “resistance against the acceleration of pictures and everyday life” (“Wehr gegen die Beschleunigung der Bilder und des Alltags”, Schmidt 2003a, 26), exemplified by the protagonist of La Télévision, who has decided to resist watching television (see Schmidt 2003a, 27). More recently, Adler (2016) has presented similar reflections according to which Toussaint’s novels make a case for doing nothing, thus offering resistance against the contemporary logic of productivity. She argues that Toussaint’s novels open – not only for Toussaint and/or his narrator protagonists, but also for its readers – “spaces of reverie in the middle of a daily routine that is governed by the logics of performances” (see Adler 2016, 109–110, translation mine). According to Chaudier, Toussaint’s narrator protagonists display a certain resistance against the idea of efficiency (“refus de l’efficience”, 2016b, 238)

30 Insofar as the protagonists are identical with the autodiegetic narrators, it is sometimes neither easy nor necessary to distinguish strictly between the diegetic and extradiegetic level. I will therefore include in this section approaches that draw on the narrator as a fictive character. Aspects that touch on the narrator as a dimension of narrative construction will be included further below.

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because they are haunted by the fear of work and productivity.31 McGarry (2003) characterises Toussaint’s novels via a combination of “resistance” (“refus”, McGarry 2003, 87) – especially in La Télévision, which poses the question of “how to resist [. . .] the temptation of televisual aberration” (90, here and hereafter my translation) – and “affirmation” (namely “of art and life”, see 97): “La salle de bain (se refuser à quitter un lieu clos), L’appareil-photo (se refuser à faire des photos d’identité), ou La télévision (se refuser à regarder la télévision) affirment un système de valeurs accompagné d’une réflexion sur la représentation [. . .]” (87).32 Besides these “pictures of resistance” (Schmidt 2003a, 26) on the level of the storyworld, the idea of resistance has also been invoked in order to describe aspects of the (ii) narrative composition of Toussaint’s novels, including the level of narrative discourse, of Toussaint’s poetology and writing style as well as the effects of narrative compositions on the reader. Demanze (2016) identifies a form of resistance that is anchored in the author’s refusal to connect the ostentatious meditativeness of the novel with concrete mental contents. The protagonists of the novels strive towards meditation and the novelistic composition fulfils all necessary conditions for such a meditative life,33 but the substance of the meditations themselves remains “opaque”.34 There is thus a resistance against meaningfulness that takes the form of an “intransitivity”,35 which deprives readers of the signifier of the signifying meditations. Huglo and Leppik (2010) highlight two facets of Toussaint’s prose: on the one hand, they observe a mixture of simple, elliptical and complex syntactic constructions in Toussaint’s novels, i.e., so to speak, a resistance against syntactical homogeneity or a homogeneous style. As

31 “On verra que la peur qui étreint le héros du narrateur de La Télévision est celle du travail; l’effort nécessaire pour sortir de la virtualité, du rêve, du songe ou de la chimère suscite en lui une peur presque panique” (Chaudier 2016b, 238). Adler (2016) analyses the protagonists’ resistance against efficiency in terms of distraction, that is, in terms of their absent-mindedness and their lack of “savoir-vivre” and “savoir-faire” and emphasises the burlesque quality of this distraction. 32 “La salle de bain (to refuse to quit a closed space), L’appareil-photo (to refuse to take a passport photo) or La télévision (to refuse to watch television) affirm a system of values, which is accompanied by a meditation on representation [. . .]” (McGarry 2003, 87, translation mine). 33 Notably, (i) the narrator’s isolation, (ii) the physiological imitation of meditative postures and gesture and (iii) a rainy environment whose flux and fluidity is susceptible of inducing a meditative flow (see Demanze 2016, 254–256). 34 “[. . .] à qui voudrait explorer les labyrinthes mentaux de cette œuvre romanesque, l’auteur obstinément, regulièrement, maniaquement, oppose une stratégie de l’obstacle et de l’opacité” (Demanze 2016, 251). 35 “Tel est sans doute le paradoxe de cette pensivité propre au roman de Jean-Philippe Toussaint, une pensivité sans objet ni interlocuteur, une pensivité intransitive en somme, qui n’est que virtualité inachevée, flottement indécis, contours vagues” (Demanze 2016, 258).

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an effect on the reader, the novel “resists readability” (“résistance à la lisibilité”, Huglo and Leppik 2010, 36).36 On the other hand, the novels’ restricted intrigues as well as their resistance against the construction of narrative tension37 – Chaudier (2016b, 246) speaks about a “deliberately unnovelistic poetics” (“poétique délibérément non romanesque”) – both resist (at least initially) the creation of meaning (“résistance [. . .] à l’ordre du sens”, Huglo and Leppik 2010, 41) and highlight the novels’ textuality (i.e. their écriture, see 36). Considering the literary-historical position of the novel(ist)s of the 1980s, Toussaint being one of them, Asholt also associates écriture with the idea of resistance, but in a quite different way. Considering the difficulties that the postmodern condition, especially postmodern eclecticism and superficiality, pose to the new generation of authors, Asholt considers the écriture to be a “refuge of resistance” (“Widerstandsreservat”), i.e. a means to abort postmodern strategies of assimilation (and to create new meaning): Wenn die Literatur in immer höherem Maße der Gefahr der Mediatisierung und Banalisierung ausgesetzt ist, in der selbst ein Protestpotential avantgardistischer Provenienz konsumiert oder als Text/Bild unter zahllosen gleichen Texten/Bildern zitiert und seiner Tiefe beraubt unverbindlich werden kann, dann stellt die ‘Écriture’ ein Widerstandsreservat dar, an dem solche postmodernen Vereinnahmungsstrategien scheitern können. (Asholt 1994, 15)38

Volmer, who characterises Toussaint’s écriture via an “aesthetics of futility” (“Ästhetik der Vergeblichkeit”, Volmer 2007, 219), identifies several strategies that provide Toussaint’s novels with ambiguity, one of them being Toussaint’s (often discussed) irony. What is interesting in the context of this study is a

36 Adler (2016) makes a similar observation when she states that Toussaint’s novels take their distances from the ways in which novels are commonly constructed (“distance par rapport à la bonne conduite du récit”, Adler 2016, 108). As she argues, his novels are designed to disappoint the expectations of readers and breach the contract with the reader (see 106). 37 Schulte Nordholt’s (2016) analysis of Faire l’amour, by contrast, identifies a specific form of tension in Toussaint’s prose that emerges from the alternation of urgency and patience, that is of agitated and calm phases of narration, as she explains with regard to the three parts of the novel: “toutes trois, elles sont bâties sur une crise à répétition, une phase de mouvement extrême, entrecoupée de plages de calme. Cette alternance d’immobilité et de mouvement, d’urgence et de patience, reflète bien les rapports intermittents du narrateur et de Marie, leurs tempéraments respectifs mais aussi la tension narrative du récit” (146). 38 “If literature is increasingly exposed to the danger of mediation and banalisation according to which even an avant-garde protest potential may be consumed or quoted, as a text/picture among countless similar texts/pictures, and, deprived of its depth, become noncommittal, then the ‘écriture’ represents a refuge of resistance, which is susceptible to abort postmodern strategies of assimilation” (Asholt 1994, 15, translation mine).

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short passing remark (whose importance will become clear below) according to which Toussaint’s books “resist precise interpretation” because of their “peculiar ironic tone” (Volmer 2007, 213). That is, besides the different forms of resistance displayed by Toussaint’s protagonists, narrators and écriture, there also seem to exist forms of resistance that Toussaint’s novels inspire to the reader: a resistance against readability and against interpretation. Lebrun and Prévost draw on a further form of resistance that does not specifically concern the novels written by Toussaint, but, more generally, the “new novelistic territories” of the French 80s. They make us enter a third domain of analysis that concerns (broadly speaking) (iii) the relationship between the novel, the individual and society. Lebrun and Prévost respond to a practice of reception of the novels of the 80s that reduces them on their technical side and disregards (or denies) their potential of meaning. In opposition to such approaches, Lebrun and Prévost maintain that the écriture of these novels, as disconcerting as it may be (in terms of highly banal everyday subjects, the lack of eventfulness, irony etc.), is susceptible of stimulating highly meaningful responses, such as a “resistance” against the current state of society39: Ces jeunes écrivains ne méritent pas d’être enfermés dans le ghetto du non-sens. Ils sont certes sensibles à ‘l’air du temps’ : comment s’en indigner ? Mais leurs livres ludiques, bizarres, souvent cocasses et irrigués par un humour discret, n’induisent pas forcément un consentement au monde tel qu’il est. Un roman n’a pas à fournir de remèdes aux maladies de l’époque, il suffit qu’il les montre. La résistance à une société insolite et mal jointe viendra des lecteurs : l’‘effet d’étrangeté’ peut nourrir la volonté de changement ! (Lebrun and Prévost 1990, 24, orig. emphasis)40

In his analysis of Toussaint’s first three novels, Matzat (2003) is also interested in the relationship between the novel, the individual and society, but he takes another, generic stance. Starting from the hypothesis that the relation, full of suspense, between the individual and society constitutes the central subject of the novelistic genre, Matzat discusses the question of how this relationship is modelled in Toussaint’s first three novels. Drawing on the ways in which this 39 See also Schoots’s (1997, 141–142) discussion of the following statement of Lebrun and Prévost. 40 “These young authors do not deserve to be entrapped in the ghetto of nonsense. Surely, they are sensitive to the ‘zeitgeist’: how can one be indignant at that? But their ludic, bizarre books, which are often facetious and pervaded by a discrete humour, do not necessarily induce acquiescence of the world as it is. A novel does not have to provide the remedies for the diseases of its age; it is sufficient that it lays bare these diseases. The resistance against an alienated society, which lacks social cohesion, will come from the reader; the novelistic ‘effect of strangeness’ is susceptible of nurturing the will to change!” (translation here and hereafter mine, orig. emphasis).

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relationship is represented in novels that pertain to high modernity and to the Nouveau Roman, Matzat comes to the conclusion that “Toussaint’s texts thematise moderate forms of the modern crisis of alienation. What accompanies this flattening is [. . .] a return to the type of novel that foregrounds a social perspective” (Matzat 2003, 531, emphasis mine, translation here and hereafter mine). Matzat sees two possibilities of how to interpret this “flattening” of the curve of alienation between the individual and society. Either it may be taken as evidence for “a societal development that actually leaves [more] margins [to the individual] thanks to an increasing plurality and openness in terms of individuality” (Matzat 2003, 531) or “the resistance of the individual against the alienating tendencies of the modern society has waned” (531). Briefly, while Lebrun and Prévost consider the novel to have the potential for stimulating resistance against society in “real” individuals (readers), Matzat studies the resistance of the individual against society as an inherent structure of the novel, finding it recently decreasing in comparison with modern novels and the Nouveau Roman. Provided that Matzat’s study is concerned with resistance as an element of generic classification, we have already encountered the fourth and last aspect of resistance studied here, namely resistance on the level of categorisation. In an article on the contemporary aesthetics of the novel, Viart maintains that one of the essential characteristics of the new generation of novels consists of a “dialogic posture”, which confronts heritage with modernity, the subject with the other, reflection with fiction, the history with the imaginary and the present with the past (see Viart 2001, 334). Inasmuch as this dialogical stance is opposed to any assertive mode of writing, this “disenchanted literature” (333, translation mine) shows a certain resistance against categorisation and theorisation.41 Such a resistance against categorisation has also been postulated, more specifically, with regard to Toussaint. Considering the unpredictable shifts in Toussaint’s writing practice, Stump considers Toussaint to be “a writer who, twenty years into his career, is still devising, discovering, and rethinking the parameters of his œuvre, actively resisting definition, categorization, and closure” (2006, 99, emphasis mine). Stump focuses his attention especially on Toussaint’s resistance against closure – referred to as “a consistent refusal to conclude” (99) and as “an opposition to ends and ending” (100) –, which is argued to constitute a “coherent creative stance” (100) within Toussaint’s works.

41 “Refusant de se saisir sur un mode catégoriel et théorique, elle dilue les genres, privilégie la rencontre et la confrontation. Sa position oscille entre interrogation et témoignage, inquiétude et recherche, exigence et plaisir” (Viart 2001, 334).

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6.2 Resistance as a narrative dynamic at the text-reader nexus If resistance can thus be said to characterise Toussaint’s narrativity, the notion itself deserves some clarification. The Oxford Dictionary of English explicates four meanings of resistance, the first one being “the refusal to accept or comply with something”.42 (As we see here, “refusal” and “resistance” are semantically tightly connected – this is why studies that identify aspects of “refusal” in Toussaint’s novels have been included in the selective research review above.) My schematheoretical43 study of Toussaint’s resistance complies well with this definition of resistance, due to theorising narrative resistance as the means through which textual-narrative structures “refuse to comply with” the reader’ cognitive schemata, which they simultaneously activate. This is the basic definition. Narrative resistance may be differentiated from two other narrative dynamics, narrative gap filling and narrative projection. Narrative gap filling refers to cases in which textual-narrative structures do not fill the slots of activated schemata (emptiness of conceptual slots or lack of conceptual values).44 Narrative projection (see

42 An important meaning, subsumed under this first word meaning, is that of resistance as a movement (“a secret organization resisting authority, especially in an occupied country”) and, more specifically, of “the Resistance”, i.e. “the underground movement formed in France during the Second World War to fight the German occupying forces and the Vichy government. Also called maquis” (see “resistance” in Stevenson 2015). I do not draw on this historicalpolitical component of the meaning of resistance in my use of the term, but focus rather on the general definition quoted above. Three further meanings of resistance, explicated by the Oxford Dictionary of English, are “the ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely”, “the impeding or stopping effect exerted by one material thing on another” as well as “the degree to which a substance or device opposes the passage of an electric current, causing energy dissipation”. The French Dictionaries Grand Larousse de la Langue Française and Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française divide the meaning of resistance into two main meanings: resistance as a physical phenomenon versus human action (Grand Robert 2001, 2009–2011); resistance in the former sense implies the opposition to physical forces (“Le fait de résister à une action ou à une force physique”, Grand Larousse 1977, 5116) and the opposition to physical or moral constraints (“Action de résister à une contrainte physique ou moral”, 5116), the latter including la Résistance (“Nom donné à l’action menée par tous ceux qui, dans plusieurs pays d’Europe, s’opposèrent à l’occupation de leur territoire par les armées allemandes au cour de la Seconde Guerre mondiale”, 5117). 43 For a summary of schema theory, see section 3.1.2. I follow Schneider’s (2000, 41) proposal to work with the term “schema” (and not with the term “frame”) because of its high degree of versatility. In the following analysis, schemata (as well as corresponding subschemata and slots) will be rendered in small capitals, as is customary in linguistics. 44 There are two ways of understanding narrative gap-filling. The first is related to Schank and Abelson’s observation that stories activate scripts (a knowledge structure of experience-

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chapter 4) refers to cases in which the narration presents more narrative elements for one conceptual slot than scheduled by the schema (overfilling of conceptual slots or superabundance of conceptual values). While these two narrative dynamics are triggered by an incongruent quantity of narrative elements with regard to their schema slots (or schemata), narrative resistance refers to negotiations that are due to the incongruent quality of narrative elements regarding schema slots. In other words, the text provides neither too few not too many data with regard to an activated schema or schema slot, but offers input that cannot be easily integrated into the schema. Insofar as all knowledge (including word concepts) can be said to be stored in schemata,45 this definition of narrative resistance admittedly has the drawback of being extremely broadly applicable and methodologically indefinite. This inconvenience, however, represents perhaps also its greatest advantage since it allows one to identify corresponding processes of coherence in progress on all levels of narrativity, from textual micro-phenomena to macro-structures. Another benefit of my schema-theoretical approach to resistance is that it urges scholars to be quite precise about the specific nature of the resistance claimed by them, since the approach requires that one specifies, on the one hand, which textual elements are supposed to trigger which schema and, on the other, in which ways these elements resist complying with the corresponding schema.

based, “pre-stored groupings of actions”, 1977, 67) and thereby fill informational gaps: “There are scripts for eating in a restaurant, riding a bus, watching and playing a football game, participating in a birthday party, and so on. These scripts are responsible for filling in the obvious information that has been left out of a story” (41). Herman elaborates on this kind of gapfilling in terms of a narrative “script-story interface” (2002, 93), but he highlights the important role that deviations from scripts play in narratives and for tellability: “It is not that stories are recognizable only if and insofar as they tell me what I already know; rather, stories stand in a certain relation to what I know, focusing attention on the unusual and the remarkable against a backdrop made up of highly structured patterns of belief and expectation” (2002, 90). Furthermore, he argues that “capturing the difference between narratives and stereotyped sequences of events or scripts is tantamount to defining narrativehood, or what makes a story a story. Capturing the variable quality of this contrast – that is, accounting for the way different kinds of narratives orient themselves differently toward stereotyped sequences of actions and events – is tantamount to defining narrativity, or how readily a narrative can be processed as a narrative” (86, orig. emphasis). The second way of understanding gap-filling refers not to general gaps of information in a narrative, but to strategic gaps that narrative discourse creates in the cognitive narrative schema or gestalt of readers while they read. Sternberg’s analysis of “gapping-to-gap-filling teleology” (2010, 640) can be assigned to this category. 45 See Rumelhart (1980). As Oakley notes, “[c]ognitive linguists assume that [. . .] the lexical [. . .] items reside on a continuum of meaning from specific to schematic, and that all linguistic structures are instantiated as parts of Idealized Cognitive Models” (2007, 218).

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Before I turn to my analysis, I would like to clarify my narratological understanding of resistance by taking the argument of Keidel into consideration according to which the protagonist of L’Appareil-photo resists reality (and vice versa). Keidel’s argument is (explicitly) based on utterances of the autodiegetic narrator – his well-known reflections on how to act on an olive: Et, tandis que je continuais de m’attarder [. . .], je sentais confusément que la réalité à laquelle je me heurtais commençait peu à peu à manifester quelques signes de lassitude; elle commençait à fatiguer et à mollir oui, et je ne doutais pas que mes assauts répétés [. . .] finiraient peu à peu par épuiser la réalité, comme on peut épuiser une olive avec une fourchette, si vous voulez, en appuyant très légèrement de temps à autre, et que, lorsque, exténuée, la réalité n’offrirait enfin plus de résistance [. . .]. (AP, 50, emphasis mine)46

The narrator both creates and interprets the metaphor of the olive, translating the relationship between the fork and the olive into his relationship to reality. For him, reality, as he conceives of it (i.e. his REALITY schema) and he himself do not fit together, do not naturally interlock. The use of the verb “se heurter à” (“with which I was grappling”) epitomises this incoherence between identity and reality, i.e. their refusal to comply with each other. The solution to this incompliance consists (according to the narrator) of the strategy of “exhausting” the olive/reality by means of an iterative strategy, which becomes explicit only on the pictorial level of the metaphor, as a repeated squeezing of the olive. Keidel, following the narrator’s metaphor, translates this strategy onto the diegetic level (i.e. onto the protagonist’s treatment of reality) by interpreting the protagonist’s repeated visiting of the driving school (and Pascale) as a means of “exhausting” reality (see Keidel 2009, 126). Other transferrals would of course be possible. One could argue, for instance, that the often-noted iterative writing mode of Toussaint (“La répétition mot à mot de certaines expressions”, Schoots 1997, 177) correlates with the narrator’s ideas of resistance and exhaustion. As interesting as these observations and reflexions may be, one has to note that the primary source of these interpretative approaches are utterances of the narrator. Working with the narratological concept of narrative resistance, however, means something else: not searching for passages in which the narrator explicitly thematises resistance, but searching for performances of “resistance”,

46 “And, while I continued to linger in the stall [. . .], I vaguely felt that the reality with which I was grappling was beginning little by little to show some signs of fatigue; it was beginning to soften and slacken, oh yes it was, and I had no doubt that my repeated assaults [. . .] would end up exhausting reality little by little, as one wears out an olive with a fork, if you will, by pushing down on it lightly from time to time, and that when, weary, reality finally offers no more resistance, I knew that nothing could then stop my impetus [. . .]” (C, 44, emphasis mine).

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that is, for means by which the text triggers an experience of resistance at the textcognition interface, through the text’s composition. In other words, as insightful as it is to note that the protagonist of L’Appareil-photo experiences a form of resistance with regard to his reality, the question with which one is concerned if one analyses the dynamic of narrative resistance is to know how readers experience forms of resistance, i.e. incongruences between textual structures and our cognitive schema structures. While that passage above could be analysed in this manner, the focal point in this case is not the incongruence between the protagonist and his reality, but the way in which the textual input activates and simultaneously refuses to comply with the REALITY schema of readers. What is important, from this schematheoretical point of view, is not the difficulty of matching the metaphor (of pressing the olive) with the literal meaning (of “exhausting reality”), which the narrator hands to the readers (so to speak) on a silver platter – even though the conceptual integration of the literal and metaphorical spaces is indeed challenging.47 The resistance consists of the deviant way in which the text uses the verbal schema TO EXHAUST (EXHAUSTER). The subject of a state of exhaustion is generally a human (or another living) being; if somebody is exhausted, it is because something (for example, a challenging scientific project, or life or reality as such) or someone has exhausted her or him; that is, the human being is generally someone who is in the passive position of bearing a state of exhaustion. The passage quoted above activates this conceptual schema of exhaustion, but fails to comply with it. Firstly, the human protagonist no longer occupies a passive, but rather an active position; it is he who produces exhaustion. Secondly, the entity that is the object of this exhaustion is itself not a living, sensible human being, but an abstract conceptual entity, namely REALITY. Thirdly, given that REALITY is a highly subjective concept, since everyone has a different conception of what reality is, the object of the exhaustion is not even separated from the one who creates it. The protagonist turns to “exhaust” an allegedly antagonistic entity that is an 47 Theories of cognitive metaphors and blending theory can help to analyse this difficulty. The conceptual source (i.e. the olive and the act of squeezing it) cannot be mapped onto the conceptual target (i.e. on reality and its “exhaustion”), probably because there are practically no conceptual overlaps between reality, which is a fairly abstract conceptual schema, and an olive. As far as I see, their “generic space”, as Fauconnier and Turner (2002) would put it, is almost empty. The only conceptual connection susceptible of linking the two concepts is a shared, potential quality: hardness. “Hard reality” (dure réalité) is a linguistic collocation and our encyclopaedic knowledge tells us that olives can be pretty hard. Toussaint’s metaphorisation of the act of squeezing an olive, which represents a strategy of making the olive and, respectively, reality less hard, is therefore not easy to process and resists, to a certain extent, metaphorical processing.

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integral part of himself. Briefly, the text creates a cognitive structure that inverses a common parlance and schema structure; in the novel, it is not the “hard” reality that is exhausting for the protagonist, but it is the protagonist who seeks to exhaust the “hard reality”. I suppose that it is this what researchers find interesting about the metaphor and what makes them draw so frequently on this passage. Scholars are obviously fascinated by this concrete instance of narrative resistance, which they experience as readers of this passage of the novel. Working with the narratological concept of narrative resistance allows us, as readers, to analyse the reason for our fascination from a cognito-narratological point of view. As we see, readers and their schemata play an important role in any identification of narrative resistances, but this requires some circumspection, since “the reader” does not exist, but only different readers with different epistemic conditions (see my considerations on the S/U problem in chapter 2). When Huglo and Leppik, for instance, claim that the mixture of simple, elliptical and complex syntactic constructions resists readability, then one has to assume that “readability”, as a slot of the schema NOVEL or ŒUVRE of a specific author, is associated to a conceptual slot of “syntactic homogeneity” (or homogeneous “style”). Not all readers, however, will associate the schema NOVEL or ŒUVRE with this slot, but rather literary scholars, who are familiar with studies of style.48 Huglo and Leppik’s other statement, according to which Toussaint’s novels resist (easy) meaning-making, draws on an expectation that is not bound to the slot of the (very universal) schema of COMMUNICATION, the latter being supposed to serve the creation or transmission of meaning (or to serve, as Grice puts it in the context of his ‘maxims of conversation’, the “maximally effective exchange of information”, see Grice 1975, 47). But is it possible to consider ‘maxims of conversation’ as ‘slots’ of the schema COMMUNICATION? I have to admit that, especially in this context, it becomes obvious that the term “slot” does not always seem to be perfectly adequate. Grice speaks in the context of his analysis, more adequately, of “conversational implicatures”, or of a subjacent “cooperative principle”. However, since it seems necessary for my present narratological purposes to simplify the complexity of the relationships between cognitive representations of entities (frames) or processes (scripts)/concepts/ideas/words, on the one hand, and the potentially numerous features/parts/principles/purposes/contexts/uses that may be (more or less) essentially associated with them, on the other hand, I will refer, for 48 I think, for instance, on the epoch-making study of Spitzer who claims that “[. . .] one recognises a Proustian sentence directly” (Spitzer 1928, 385, translation mine). He also dropped the term “languages of style” (“Stilsprachen”) in the title of the second volume of Stilstudien, thereby suggesting that there is a homogeneous specificity to an author’s way of writing.

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pragmatic reasons, to the former as the schema and to the latter as its slots. In the present study, the notion of slot thus refers, quite generally, to conceptual requirements or specifications that are (more or less strongly) connected with a specific schema. As vague as this terminology unfortunately is, it seems to me that it is at least sufficient so as to differentiate between different kinds of narrative resistance and also other narrative dynamics. In other words, not only do I hope to show the ways in which Toussaint’s novels are narratively “resistant”; I also hope to provide an analytical tool that allows both to identify strategies of narrative resistance in the texts of other authors and to explain the ways in which the dynamics of different authors (e.g. a Toussaint, a Kafka and a Laclos) differ from each other. I do not want to claim, however, that Toussaint’s narrativity is characterised by nothing but narrative resistance. With regard to the numerous studies that identify forms of resistance in Toussaint’s novels, I rather start from the assumption that narrative resistance is an important narrative dynamic of Toussaint’s novelistic œuvre. Following Stump’s observation that Toussaint’s writing practice undergoes considerable shifts, one should, however, not rule out the possibility that the frequency and form of the employment of this form of narrative negotiation may vary from novel to novel or from one phase of creation to another.

6.3 The slot of ‘tellability’: Rhizomatic aspects of Toussaint’s narrativity In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Toussaint’s novels resist complying with the expectation of readers that something “tellable” will be narrated in a novel. This can be considered as a specific kind of narrative resistance insofar as tellability, as a narrative requirement or quality, can be considered an important “slot” of the schema NARRATIVE, including the generic schema of the NOVEL. I will first explore the narratological notion of tellability and, in the following subchapters, study the ways in which Toussaint’s novels resist filling this slot. Moreover, using dimensions of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizome (notably the principles of “n-1” and connectivity) for narratological analysis, I will identify dynamic, rhizomatic meaning structures that can be argued to replace more traditional narrative means of producing tellability. My analysis of these rhizomatic narrative structures should contribute, on a theoretical level, to a better understanding of the interdependencies between narrativity, tellability and coherence.

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6.3.1 The narratological concept of ‘tellability’ The concept of tellability has first been developed in conversational storytelling analysis. Important references are Labov’s considerations on the transformation of experience in narrative syntax in the last chapter of Language in the Inner City (1972). According to Labov, “the skeleton of a narrative [. . .] consists of a series of temporally ordered clauses which we may call narrative clauses” (Labov 1972, 361, orig. emphasis). Labov maintains that, although a narrative may contain only narrative clauses, “there are other elements of narrative structure found in more fully developed types” (362–363). He identifies six elements: the (i) abstract (“one or two clauses summarizing the whole story”, 363), (ii) orientation (identification of “the time, place, and persons, and their activity or the situation”, 364), (iii) complicating action, (iv) evaluation (“the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at”, 366), (v) result or resolution and (vi) coda (clauses “signalling that the narrative is finished”, 365). It is the fourth component of narratives that brings tellability into play: There are many ways to tell the same story, to make very different points, or to make no point at all. Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, ‘So what?’ Every good narrator is continually warding off this question; when his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, ‘So what?’ Instead, the appropriate remark would be ‘He did?’ or similar means of registering the reportable character of the events of the narrative. (Labov 1972, 366)

Labov’s concept of evaluation combines several interdependent aspects of tellability: the “point” of the story as it emerges from the story as a whole (“when his narrative is over”), the (good or bad) quality49 of a narration (“every good narrator [. . .]”), the reaction of the recipient (“So what?” versus “He did?”) and the reportability of the narrated events. Further research on tellability has led to an even more differentiated discussion of what influences and what exactly is meant by tellability. I would like to summarise this theoretical debate in terms of six aspects, which are tightly interconnected. Firstly, the (perhaps) most basic differentiation concerns the narratological story-discourse distinction (see section 2.3.1); there is a difference between judging a story “good” (“or bad”) because of the content of the narrative (level of story) or because of the way the content is presented (level of discourse). In Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Ryan (1991) argues

49 As I have argued in chapter 3, there is a close connection between narrativity, coherence and literariness. Labov’s remarks undergird this claim.

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for restricting the scope of tellability on the story, developing the idea of an intrinsic tellability. This notion is based on configurations of facts (and/or their mental representation) that precede any textualisation (see Ryan 1991, 148) and that are “inherently worth telling” (Ryan 2005b, 589). The existence of a narrative text is justified either informationally or aesthetically. The justification is supported by certain properties. Among these properties, some are inseparable from the letter of the text. Others remain present in paraphrases and summaries. The former fall within the scope of a theory of performance. The latter form the specific concern of a theory of tellability. (Ryan 1991, 149)50

Also Baroni maintains that “it is generally assumed that tellability pertains only to the story level and that it should thus be dissociated from the broader concept of narrative interest as comprising both story and discourse features” (Baroni 2014, 837).51 Nonetheless, inasmuch as this definition of tellability is based upon a specific narrative level, it inherits the problems that are generally associated with the theoretical story-discourse distinction, including the delicate question whether they are separable at all (see section 2.3.1). Sternberg (2010), for instance, criticises the reduction of discourse on the form of the story: “you’ll see for yourself that the two-sequence52-but-one-definitional53 narratologies [. . .] must all fall apart, inescapably and irreparably; the question is only in how many ways or into how many pieces” (Sternberg 2010, 606). Ryan (1991) admits as well that there are cases where no clear distinction between story- and discourse-related points can be made. Drawing on Wilensky’s typology of “points” (especially on his “dynamic points”), she introduces the idea of strategic points, which rely on the deviation from reader expectations. Although these strategic points are a matter of discourse, triggered by devices such as prolepsis, analepsis, withdrawal of information, ellipsis or ambiguity (see Ryan 1991, 153), they can also be instantiated by devices on the story level. Strategic points thus “illustrate the fuzziness of the borderline between [a discourse-related] theory of performance and [a story-related] theory of tellability” (Ryan 1991, 154). Besides the question of where tellability can be located, there is a second subject of discussion that concerns the possibility of distinguishing between tellability and narrativity. There are generally two arguments put forward in 50 In an article on tellability from 2005, Ryan states more precisely that these two components of narratives – now called the “rhetorical or performantial component” and the “tellability component” – represent two facets of “what makes a narrative successful” (Ryan 2005b, 590). 51 Nonetheless, also discourse features, contextual parameters and interactional dynamics can influence tellability (see below). 52 That is, story and discourse. 53 That is, narratologies that consider the story as the defining element of narrativity.

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favour of their distinction. Firstly, narrativity is generally considered to draw on narrative manifestations whereas “tellability is perceived independently from its textualization” (Baroni 2014, 836). Secondly, as Labov has already pointed out, there are stories that have no point, no tellability, but which yet have narrativity insofar as they are considered as narratives (see Baroni 2014, 836–837). As Ryan puts it, tellability “contrasts with narrativity, a property found in all texts interpretable as stories, whether they elicit a ‘so what’ or a ‘wow’ reaction” (Ryan 2005b, 589). But Ryan also admits that “the two concepts are often hard to disentangle, and some scholars regard tellability as a condition of narrativity” (2005b, 589). Bruner (1991), for instance, considers narrativity to depend upon a “breach of canonicity”, which makes the story worth telling, and Herman (2002), who draws on Bruner’s approach, maintains that “[. . .] stories stand in a certain relation to what I know, focusing attention on the unusual and the remarkable against a backdrop made up of highly structured patterns of belief and expectation” (Herman 2002, 90). Whether one argues for or against the distinctness of the notions of narrativity and tellability, the theory of tellability still reveals that there is a conceptual connection between narrativity and tellability. The discussion on whether tellability is a phenomenon of story or of discourse reveals this close connection between the two notions, insofar as narrativity itself poses the same question (see section 2.3.1).54 What also indicates a close connection between narrativity and tellability is the idea of experientiality – the core concept of Fludernik’s (1996) definition of narrativity –, which comes into play in the discussion of tellability as well (see Baroni 2014, 841). Fludernik, who draws on the dynamics between tellability and point noted by Labov, sees an interdependency between experientiality, tellability and narrativity, maintaining that is the “conjunction of experience reviewed, reorganized, and evaluated (‘point’) that constitutes narrativity” (Fludernik 2003, 245, emphasis mine; also quoted in Baroni 2014, 841). In Chapter 2 and 3, I have argued, with a side glance to forms or functions of certain literary narratives, that narrativity cannot be disconnected from the (concept and phenomenon) of literariness. In view of the connection between narrativity and tellability, it does not come as a surprise, then, that tellability is, thirdly, also associated with matters of literariness, in the sense of an (evaluation of the) quality of (here: narrative) literature. Already Labov’s concept of tellability is concerned with the (good or bad) quality of narratives. Ryan, on her part, relates 54 In this regard, Bruner, for instance, maintains that “[t]he ‘breach’ component of a narrative can be created by linguistic means [i.e., on the level of ‘discourse’, ESW] as well as by the use of a putatively delegitimizing precipitating event in the plot [i.e., on the level of ‘story’, ESW]” (Bruner 1991, 12).

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tellability to a scale of literariness spanning from “high literature” to “popular literature”; she notes that “[w]hereas popular literature invests heavily in the tellability of plots, high literature often prefers to make art out of the not-tellable [. . .]” (Ryan 2005b, 590) – an observation that will turn out to be possibly very pertinent with regard to Toussaint. Similarly, Baroni points out that “the breach of a canonical order is more relevant in popular fiction or in personal anecdotes told to amuse than in experimental literature” (see Baroni 2014, 843). Thinking in terms of a typology of narrative classes rather than in terms of a scale of narrative literariness, Baroni draws, fourthly, on the relationship between tellability and narrative genres. He maintains that “tellability must be explored in close connection with generic conventions” and proposes, as a topic of future research, to analyse the “interactional dynamics related to specific kinds of narratives, ranging from ‘stories with little or no claim to reportability’ to untold, untellable, or hardly tellable narratives” (Baroni 2014, 843). I consider this chapter as a contribution to this vector of research. The fifth aspect of tellability covers what has been called “parameters” (see Baroni 2014), “guidelines” or “principles” (see Ryan 1991) of tellability, that is, contextual and cultural parameters55 as well as forms of semantic complexity (see Ryan 2005b; 1991, 154). Concerning semantic structures of the stories, Ryan (1991) argues that one can distinguish between “substantial points”, i.e. a form of tellability that is intrinsically related to themes, motifs or topoi (as the substance of the narrative contents), and “points involving the form of the narrative content” (i.e. a form of tellability that evolves from the semantic structure of the contents). The latter can again be divided. On the one hand, Ryan argues for the existence of a basic semantic structure that makes a narrative both narrative and tellable, consisting of a conflict and at least one attempt to find a solution for it (see Ryan 1991, 154). On the other hand, there are “specialized guidelines”, more precisely, three additional semantic structures that are susceptible of enhancing semantic tellability.56 Ryan identifies three such semantic narrative structures: 55 Ryan (1991) and Baroni (2014) point out that tellability can be context-specific or (relatively) context-free, context-specific tellability relying on the newsworthiness and expectationdefying nature of the information, tellability being culture-relative or (relatively) universal. While some narratives thematise universal human preoccupations, other topics are more of concern in the context of specific cultures (such as power or money in Western capitalist societies, see Ryan 2005b, 590). 56 They are “derived from the properties that account for aesthetic effect in lyric poetry: oppositions, repetitions, and polysemy. While the canons of poetry apply to words, syllables, and individual images, their narrative equivalents operate on a semantic material consisting of states and events” (Ryan 1991, 155).

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1.

2.

3.

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Semantic opposition (e.g. sudden turns in the plot; reversals in the fortunes of characters; a contrast between the goals of characters and the result of their actions); Semantic parallelism and symmetry (e.g. narrative sequences that present structural similarities but involve different participants; triplications in fairy tales); Functional polyvalence (= first kind of complexity): Narrative highlights are formed by events entering into several distinct functional units. By functional unit I mean a grouping of states and events [. . .] presenting special strategic significance for the story as a whole. This strategic significance is captured by a label, such as retaliation, reward, deceit, test, challenge, or betrayal. (Ryan 1991, 155)

Ryan (2005b) considers functional polyvalence as one of two forms of semantic complexity that influence the degree of tellability, the second of which thus represents a fourth semantic structure of content. It consists of 4. Virtuality (= second kind of complexity): “a narrative’s ability to deploy a rich field of virtualities” (Ryan 2005b, 590). Ryan sustains the hypothesis “that tellability is rooted in conceptual and logical complexity, and that the complexity of a plot depends on an underlying system of purely virtual embedded narratives” (Ryan 1991, 156). In other words, [. . .] some events make better stories than others because they project a wider variety of forking paths on the narrative map. Even though the story can follow only one path, the understanding of these events involves a consideration of the ‘virtual narratives’ of the unrealised sequences that branch out of the event. (Ryan 2005b, 590)

In this context, Ryan (1991) postulates a “principle of diversification”, which contributes to tellability; it is represented by the imperative “seek the diversification of possible worlds in the narrative universe” (Ryan 1991, 156). As Ryan’s “plot-map” for Cinderella (see Ryan 1991, 160) shows, the tellability of a narrative depends (quite rhizomatically) upon the complexity of a plot network of actual57 and virtual58 events and virtual embedded narratives.59

57 Example for an actual event in Cinderella: Cinderella and her stepsisters are invited to the ball (see Ryan 1991, 159–161). 58 Example for a virtual event in Cinderella: Cinderella goes to the ball with stepmother and stepsisters (see Ryan 1991, 159–161). 59 Virtual embedded narratives are created by the plans, intents and passive projections of (or are ascribable to) fictive characters. They connect actual and virtual events, thus producing a broad, partly virtual plot network. Example: Cinderella’s wish to go to the ball and marry the prince connects two actual events: her invitation to the ball and her making herself a dress

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The sixth and last aspect of tellability concerns what could be called the “mode” of tellability. It addresses the question of whether the tellability of a particular narrative is punctual or extended and whether it is prefabricated or progressively constructed.60 It seems to me that the processual mode of tellability correlates partly with my concept of coherence in progress insofar as it is a kind of (cooperative) “tellability in progress” that questions the idea that there has to be a pre-existent point that merely requires mediation by the narration. As the narratological research on the whole topic clearly shows, tellability as a requirement (and as an expectation) is closely connected to narrative artefacts: I thus propose to consider tellability, for the purposes of this chapter, as a slot of the concept NARRATIVE61 – a slot that is activated, but not filled by Toussaint’s novels.

6.3.2 ‘n-1’ According to my definition of narrative resistance, two conditions have to be fulfilled in order to state a narrative resistance: firstly, Toussaint’s texts have to activate the schema NARRATIVE and its TELLABILITY slot; secondly, they should trigger a readerly experience according to which the textual elements refuse to

(see Ryan 1991, 159–161). As Ryan notes, there is an overlap between her parameter of complex virtuality and the first type of Prince’s (1988) concept of the disnarrated, which denotes the “outline of an unrealized possibility imagined by a character” (Ryan 1991, 167–168). Ryan’s virtual embedded narratives, however, may also be “left entirely implicit”, while Prince’s definition of the disnarrated “insists on an explicit representation” (1991, 168). 60 As Ryan notes, tellability can be concentrated in a “single, precisely identifiable feature” or can be the “effect of properties that operate throughout the narrative, structuring interest in the story as a sequence of peaks and valleys” (Ryan 2005b, 590). The latter idea of a tellability that develops throughout the narrative may be connected with reflections from Ochs and Capps on conversational storytelling, according to which, as Baroni summarises, “the point of a story and its relative tellability are not always characteristics found by the narrator in the potential story before it is performed, but rather variables that must be factored in during the process of narrating, involving several co-narrators cooperating in construction of the storyline” (see Baroni 2014, 841–842). 61 To be more precise, if one takes the conceptual components of tellability into account, as they have been identified by narratologists, it becomes obvious that it is possible to “zoom” deeper into the notion of tellability. In other words, tellability is not only a conceptual slot of the schema narrative, but it is also by itself a concept that has further slots (e.g. point, diegetic conflict, virtuality, etc.). If Toussaint’s narrativity relies on dynamics that resist fitting into the tellability slot of the schema narrative, then one can assume that there is a resistance against one or several of the various slots of tellability.

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fit into these conceptual slots. The problem of verifying the fulfilment of these conditions lies, of course, in the individuality and subjectivity of readers and reading experiences. I will deal with this problem by taking into consideration, on the one hand, the professional analyses and interpretations of literary scholars (which bear witness to individual, empirical readings); and, on the other hand, by presenting, complementarily, as one (further) empirical reader, my own reflections. The first thing that jumps out, as one reads the research literature on Toussaint, is that most scholars do not make a clear distinction between narrativity and tellability, while narratological theories of tellability make an effort to draw a boundary between the two notions. Interpretative approaches see apparently a close connection between the degree of eventfulness, of tellability and narrativity. Caldwell, for instance, maintains that “[t]hese are faint stories, antinarratives. Very little ‘happens’ in Toussaint’s novels” (Caldwell 1995, 370). Caldwell also observes that “Toussaint systematically narrates not the central action itself, but rather what occurs in the margins” (379) – that is, what seems to be less “tellable”. On a very general level, it is widely acknowledged that Toussaint’s novels show a certain resistance to tellability. It is seldom obvious, with regard to the storyworld, why the narrated – banalities, everyday life, meticulous descriptions of things, little incidents and gestures – is told and what its point is. In other words, the particular narrative elements form a kind of “assemblage” that is “unattributable” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 4) to a unifying meaningful narrative scheme. Stump, for instance, observes the “absence of any conclusive way to understand the relationship of [. . .] events to a larger story”, highlighting the “directionless quality” of these “inconclusive” events (Stump 2006, 99). Adler (2016, 107) speaks about an “ensemble of insignificant details” (translation mine). Motte calls Toussaint’s prose an “epic of the trivial” (Motte 1995, 751) and identifies a “novelistic logic of the minute” (751). He observes a diegetic concentration on the “thingness” of things62 (such as the bathroom in La Salle de bain, which has neither a specifically individual touch nor any extraordinary qualities) and diagnoses “an attack upon traditional narrative teleology” and causality63 (754–755), and thus upon two important macro-structural features of narratives (see chapter 2). Also Demanze (2016, 253) questions the narrative status of Toussaint’s novels implicitly as he describes them as “traités de

62 See also Viart (2001, 329) and Huglo and Leppik (2010, 29). 63 Jacobs analyses associative mechanisms, such as homonymic bridges, which replace causal coherence (see Jacobs 1994, 346–348). See also Schoots (1997, 114).

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méditation” (“tractates of meditation”). Indeed, many analyses of Toussaint’s prose (predominantly of his early novels) amount to stating an apparent lack of macro-structural organisation, which opposes a certain resistance to the readers’ expectations and requirements.64 Tellability comes into play here, since patterns on a macro-structural level are the condition for the establishment of coherence, the latter being in turn necessary for capturing the meaning and thus for understanding the point of a narrative. But which patterns structure the macro-level of a narrative, thereby creating meaning? At least since Barthes, narrative meaning is understood to result from hierarchical structures: [. . .] on ne peut douter que le récit soit une hiérarchie d’instances. Comprendre un récit, ce n’est pas seulement suivre le dévidement de l’histoire, c’est aussi y reconnaître des ‘étages’, projeter les enchaînements horizontaux du ‘fil’ narratif sur un axe implicitement vertical. (Barthes 1966, 5)65

Indeed, already Propp’s “fonctions” as well as Barthes’s “sequences” (such as “fraud”, “treason” or “struggle”, see Barthes 1975, 253), which actually refer to schemata, are higher-level units, umbrella concepts that cover (i.e., give closure and thus meaning to) a potential variety of subordinated narrative micro-events. Teleology and causality, prominent structural features of narrativity, are hierarchical in nature as well. Teleology structures narrative elements prospectively, subordinating them under a governing telos; causality structures them retrospectively, via a superordinate causal chain, which decides upon the pertinence (and memorability) of narrative elements (see, for example, Trabasso, Secco and Van den Broek 1984). To put it more simply, “tellable” narrative stories live traditionally by a hierarchy of information in terms of (causal, teleological, etc.) importance, ascribed by readers on the basis of textual structures. Such a hierarchical conception of narrative meaning is still topical, as Dancygier’s (2012b) approach shows.66

64 As Adler puts it: “La critique l’a abondamment noté: le narrateur mène le lecteur en bateau, il le distrait de toute histoire qu’il serait en droit d’attendre” (2016, 105). 65 “[. . .] there is no doubt that narrative is a hierarchy of levels or strata. To understand a narrative is not only to follow the unfolding of the story, but also to recognize in it a number of “strata”, to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative onto an implicitly vertical axis [. . .]” (Barthes 1975, 243). 66 Investigating processes that lead to the “emergence of meaning in various storytelling contexts” (Dancygier 2012b, 4), Dancygier makes a link between textual and cognitive structures, maintaining that “viewpoint spreads [. . .] through compression across narrative levels, from the lower to higher levels of the story” (90–91). Ryan, for her part, also invokes (rather figuratively) a vertical conception of narrative meaning when she analyses tellability via “narrative highlights” (Ryan 1991, 155) and “peaks and valleys” of narrative interest (Ryan 2005b, 590).

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It is this expectation of a hierarchical global narrative meaning structure, tightly connected with tellability via the requirement of a “point” (which, for its part, results from resultative coherence), that is activated, but obviously not (always) satisfied by Toussaint’s prose and perhaps, more generally, by what researchers call literary minimalism. Huglo and Leppik, for instance, who analyse “contemporary minimalist narrativities”, characterise minimalism via a logical “deflation”, a flattening of the hierarchy of events with regard to their importance or futility (see Huglo and Leppik 2010, 41). Pourquoi raconter ceci plutôt que cela et où cela mène-t-il ? Telle est la question que soulèvent les romans minimalistes, bousculant nos attentes narratives, y compris lorsqu’il ‘arrive’ quelque chose. La pertinence de l’histoire racontée est déçue jusque dans l’extraordinaire, d’où l’idée d’une superficialité attachée à ce courant. Là où le minimalisme perturbe l’ordre narratif du sens en bousculant, à différents niveaux, la hiérarchie du majeur et du mineur, le mode mineur valorise le petit, il en établit le sens et – fût-ce en pointillés – le récit. (Huglo and Leppik 2010, 42)67

Similarly, Schoots (1997, 137) notes: “Faute d’un sujet structurant et d’un principe organisateur autre que le hasard, toute hiérarchie fait défaut dans le roman minimaliste: il n’y a pas de centre, ni de périphérie”.68 Rubino (2012), who analyses Toussaint’s narrativity, also highlights the lack of a hierarchical macrostructure in Toussaint’s early works: L’attitude minimaliste dépend [. . .] autant de la nature prosaïque et anti-romanesque des faits et des événements racontés que de l’absence de subordination causale entre eux. Non seulement ils ne sont pas motivés, mais ils ne s’enchaînent pas dans des séquences compactes. L’abondance éventuelle de détails qui peut caractériser tel ou tel épisode est donc à la fois justifiée, car aucun dosage hiérarchique ne l’empêche, et injustifiée, car aucun dosage hiérarchique ne l’impose. (Rubino 2012, 73)69

67 “Why narrate this rather than that and where is this leading? This is the question brought up by minimalist novels, which confuse our narrative expectations, including cases where something ‘happens’. The tellability of the narrated story is undermined to an extraordinary degree, which is why the idea of superficiality is attached to this movement. Where the minimalism disturbs the narrative order of meaning by unravelling, on different levels, the hierarchy of the major and the minor, the minor mode valorises the little, creates its meaning and the – only roughly sketched out – narrative” (Huglo and Leppik 2010, 42, translation mine) 68 “In default of a subject that provides structure and of an organising principle besides contingency, there is no hierarchy in the minimalist novel: there is neither centre nor periphery” (translation mine). 69 “The minimalist attitude depends as much on the prosaic and anti-novelistic nature of the reported facts and events as on the absence of a causal subordination between them. They lack not only motivation, but also integration into a compact sequence. The potential abundance of details, which can characterise any episode, is thus simultaneously justified, since

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This lack of hierarchical macrostructures comes along with a lack of narrative progression and of the “functionality” of many descriptions (see Rubino 2012, 76). This observation leads Rubino to the question of whether the label “novel” can be applied to Toussaint’s texts at all. He draws the (provisional)70 conclusion that there is nothing novelistic about these novels, “no plot, no narrativity either” (77). In a similar manner, Lemesle states that Toussaint’s novels do not provide us with the plot structure one expects in a novel. But he also emphasises that this does not mean that the story level is entirely eliminated. Exception faite de La réticence, le terme d’intrigue, au sujet des romans de J.-P- Toussaint, nous semble donc impropre à qualifier des récits qui se singularisent précisément par une absence flagrante d’intrigue, et qui substituent aux événements romanesques traditionnels ce que l’on pourrait nommer des ‘micro-événements’. Toutefois, la contestation moderniste du récit classique ne paraît pas non plus réactivée dans nos textes, qui [. . .] ne détruisent pas l’histoire. (Lemesle 1998, 118–119)71

The absence of cues that make it possible to construct a story line and to “judge” the importance of what is narrated, may be characterised as rhizomatic, especially with regard to Deleuze and Guattari principle of ‘n-1’, which refers to an equal juxtaposition of a multiplicity of elements (see section 1.5): En vérité, il ne suffit pas de dire Vive le multiple, bien que ce cri soit difficile à pousser. Aucune habileté typographique, lexicale ou même syntaxique ne suffira à le faire entendre. Le multiple, il faut le faire, non pas en ajoutant toujours une dimension supérieure,

no hierarchical assignment thwarts it, and unjustified, since it is not required by any hierarchical assignment” (Schoots 1997, 37, translation mine). 70 I say “provisional” because Rubino adds that, as the primary need for coherence is not fulfilled and as logical gaps and the arbitrariness of the events clash with the readers’ expectations, the reader awaits even more the emergence of an unforeseeable meaning, thereby experiencing, paradoxically, narrativity despite a lack of narrativity. “Là où le sens fait défaut, c’est à la chasse du sens qu’on se consacre” (Rubino 2012, 77). A related claim is made, in the context of minimalist novels, by Huglo (2003), who interprets the lack of plot-related meaningfulness positively as the “promise of a secret”, which is argued to be constitutive for narrativity. Huglo and Leppik’s (2010) argument takes a similar direction, but instead of speaking of a “paradoxical narrativity”, as Rubino does, the authors distinguish, more precisely, between two kinds of tensions and narrativities, claiming the existence of a (second-degree) “heuristic tension” (Huglo and Leppik 2010, 43) and of an “acting narrativity” (“narrativité agissante”, 43). 71 “With the exception of La réticence, the label intrigue seems unsuitable, with regard to the novels from J.-P. Toussaint, for characterising narratives that precisely stand out by the flagrant absence of a plot and that substitute traditionally novelistic events by what may be called ‘micro-events’. Anyway, the modernist contestation of the classical narrative does not seem to be reactivated in our texts, which [. . .] do not destroy the story either” (Lemesle 1998, 118–119, translation mine).

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mais au contraire le plus simplement, à force de sobriété, au niveau des dimensions dont on dispose, toujours n-1 (c’est seulement ainsi que l’un fait partie du multiple, en étant toujours soustrait). Soustraire l’unique de la multiplicité à constituer; écrire à n-1. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 13).72

From a rhizomatic point of view, Toussaint has indeed “made” the multiple, precisely by not adding a higher structural-schematic dimension to the variety of descriptions and micro-events. He has created a narrative “flat multiplicity” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9), partly comparable to Kafka’s syntagmatic flatness (see section 5.4.4).73 This flat multiplicity is “no longer attributed, [. . .] [but] elevated to the status of a substantive” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 4). One can say, with Lemesle, that there is a “story” (to the extent to which there is a storyworld,74 inhabitants of this world and things happening in it), but this “story” is constituted by a multiplicity (“n”) of elements that lack a global, organising structure.

6.3.3 Resistant macro schemata and rhizomatic micro-connectivity Toussaint’s last four novels, on which I would like to concentrate in this section, lack teleology and hierarchical structure as well, but, as has often been stated, they are all in all much less minimalist than his early novels. They form a tetralogy, chiefly revolving around two protagonists: the narrator and Marie (more precisely Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte).75 The four novels

72 “In truth, it is not enough to say, ‘Long live the multiple’, difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available – always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-1 dimension. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 6). 73 While Kafka and Toussaint share the rhizomatic characteristics of “n-1”, their narrativities are nonetheless very different, primarily because Toussaint’s narratives are not characterised by narrative withdrawal. Differences can, however, already be found even on the “flat” story level; while the two authors construct story lines that lack a conceptual hierarchy, Kafka’s Schloss has clearly teleological dimensions: not only does the story live by K.’s telos to reach the castle and/or Klamm; it also lives by K.’s willingness to understand the rules that govern the sphere of village and castle. Toussaint’s novels, however, lack such a teleological component – the protagonists are simply there, comparable to the characters of Beckett’s En attendant Godot. 74 See Herman (2013a). 75 The four-fold alliteration of her name seems not only to allude to a number of intertextual references, but also to mirror the four-volume structure of the cycle of novels. Concerning the intertextual references, Loignon has pointed out that the forenames “Marie Madeleine”

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have a governing, overarching theme, namely the love relationship between the two central characters.76 Although the tetralogy has a continuity (and thus a coherence) that the other novels lack, these novels live by narrative resistance as well, as I would like to show in this section. According to my analysis, the novels resist fitting into the plot schema that they otherwise offer as a macrostructure, namely the schema of SEPARATION. Faire l’amour, the first volume of the cycle, introduces the reader into the story of a break-up, of the ending of Marie’s and the autodiegetic narrator’s love relationship. They are in Tokyo, where Marie, a successful fashion artist, will inaugurate her exposition in the ‘Contempary Art Space’ of Shinagawa. Before the narrator makes the governing subject and plot schema SEPARATION explicit,77 the textual cues that indicate (or are at least interpretable as indicating) an imminent break-up (if not a severe crisis in their relationship) are

may be interpreted as a biblical allusion and the surname “Montalte” as an allusion to Pascal’s Provinciales, subtitled “les lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte [. . .]” (see Loignon 2006, 29). Romagné (2003) sees a potential intertext in Camus’s L’étranger, which also presents a character called Marie. 76 The first novel (Faire l’amour, winter season) and the last novel (Nue, autumn-winter – actually the year following the winter of Faire l’amour) in the tetralogy focus most on the two protagonists and their relationship. The first volume recounts (as one can say retrospectively) a crisis in their love-relationship, the last (besides extensive fictionalised analepses) a kind of reunion. Fuir (summer), the second volume, narrates events that have taken place before the events in the winter of Faire l’amour. It chiefly relates the narrator’s experiences with Li Qi and Zhang Xiangzhi in (and between) Shanghai and Beijing, but Marie’s emotional presence in the narrator’s world is highlighted by a narrative digression, which relates a phone call from Marie (and which spans ten pages). This novel also tells the story of their encounter on the isle of Elba on the occasion of the funeral of Marie’s father (in the third part of the novel; this part spans fifty-seven pages). La Vérité sur Marie (spring-summer), the third volume, recounts events that have taken place after the winter of Faire l’amour. After the happenings in Tokyo, the two have broken up and live now in separated apartments. This novel is mainly constituted by the narrator’s phantasies about the deceased ex-affair of Marie, Jean-Baptiste de Ganay alias Jean-Christophe de G., and about what Marie and Jean-Christophe have experienced together (in the narrator’s imagination). The end narrates Marie’s and the narrator’s retrieval on the isle of Elba (where they experience a fire disaster and where first signs of a possible reunion can be found). 77 “N’eût-il pas été plus simple, si nous devions nous séparer, de profiter de ce voyage [. . .] pour prendre un peu de recul l’un vers l’autre? Était-ce la meilleure solution de voyager ensemble, si c’était pour rompre?” (FA, 25). (“Would it not have been simpler, if we were to separate, to take advantage of this [. . .] trip to adopt a more detached attitude toward each other? Given that we were breaking up, was traveling together the best solution?” ML, 13–14).

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already abundant, and that from the beginning: Marie does not stop weeping.78 As they enter their hotel, accompanied by a little earthquake, the narrator wonders whether the earthquake has taken place objectively, in reality, or if this quake only took place on an emotional level (“[. . .] que je me demande si ce n’était pas que dans nos cœurs qu’il [ce séisme, ESW] s’est produit”, FA, 16).79 The narrative provides two further clues that activate the schema of SEPARATION: the narrator reveals, in a proleptical anticipation, that during that night they will have made love for the last time (see FA, 16); and as Marie asks him, in the hotel room, why he doesn’t want to kiss her, the narrator answers, in one of Toussaint’s famous parentheses – and thus perhaps only in his mind –, that “it was too late now” (ML, 10). Marie’s reply is not long in coming: “Tu ne m’aimes plus” (FA, 19).80 Also the subjacent violence, which is present from the beginning, indicates that their relationship is drawing to a close. Already at the first page of the novel, Marie wonders whether the hydrochloric acid, that the narrator carries in a little viol, will not end in her face; the narrator is ostensibly hacked off and becomes slightly aggressive when he beholds Marie’s facial expression in the taxi, interpreting it as a silent reproach (“grimaçant et paraissant m’en vouloir, alors que je n’y étais manifestement pour rien, merde, s’il faisait aussi chaud dans ce taxi”, FA, 13)81; and Marie rids her arm violently of the narrator’s grip after his refusal to kiss her.82 Despite all these signs and the (deferred) explicit evocation of the schema SEPARATION, there is a host of narrative elements that do not fit this schema at all. First of all, there is the focalisation of the narrator: the main object of his attention and descriptions is Marie: details of her semblance, insights into her habits. Does one spend such scrupulously precise attention on someone one wants to separate from? Does the narrator’s strong focus on Marie not rather encode, on the level of discourse, the opposite “image schema”, namely ATTRACTION?83 At

78 It is only later that the narrator gives explanations for her weeping, notably the death of her father. But even at that point her crying remains ambiguous, since the narrator adds that tears had “been falling for weeks [. . .], tears of sorrow and love, mourning and astonishment” (ML, 12). 79 “[. . .] that I wonder if it [the quake, ESW] didn’t happen simply in our hearts” (ML, 8). 80 “You don’t love me anymore” (ML, 10). 81 “[. . .] grimacing in apparent irritation at me when it was obviously not my fault, shit, if it was too hot in that taxi” (ML, 6). 82 This would be at least one way to interpret their verbal exchange (see FA, 18–19). 83 As Oakley explains, “an image schema is a condensed redescription of perceptual experience for the purpose of mapping spatial structure onto conceptual structure. [. . .] Image schemas behave as ‘distillers’ of spatial and temporal experiences. These distilled experiences, in turn, are what Cognitive Linguistics regards as the basis for organizing knowledge and reasoning about the world” (2007, 215). As he explains, attraction is one of the “most

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least as the narrator speaks about the “magnetic power” of Marie (“Je sentais en permanence sa puissance magnétique”, FA, 151)84 and of her mouth (“ma bouche s’était sentie aimantée par sa bouche”, FA, 30),85 the concept of attraction is clearly activated. But is the fact of being extremely attracted by someone consistent with an imminent break-up? In other words, is there an ATTRACTION slot in the concept of SEPARATION? Even if one concedes that love and relationships are complicated things where much is possible, one could at least state that, on a quasi-physical, non-figurative level, the notions of SEPARATION and ATTRACTION are rather opposed to each other.86 ATTRACTION, as a possible slot value, resists fitting smoothly into the activated plot schema of SEPARATION. Interestingly, the text evokes an intertextual reference twice, namely the episode from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in which Marcel is enamoured of Gilberte. Firstly, Marcel seizes any opportunity to make Gilberte Swann the object of family conversations, finding a secret joy in hearing her name pronounced.87 The narrator alludes to this passage, thereby projecting Marcel’s role of the enamoured onto his alter ego; simultaneously, he projects the subject of UNFULFILLED LOVE onto the story. This happens in the following context: the narrator has left Tokyo for a little time-out to spend some days at his friend Bernard’s house in Kyoto. Mais, dès lors qu’il [Bernard, ESW] ne me demandait rien, et que Marie était le seul sujet qui occupait mes pensées depuis ce matin, je ne pus m’empêcher d’en parler moi-même le premier [. . .]. Et, en prononçant le nom de Marie avec cette volupté secrète qu’il y a d’évoquer ceux qu’on aime en public (je parlai d’elle le plus normalement du monde, sur le ton le plus détaché qui soit, pour dire simplement qu’elle était restée à Tokyo parce qu’elle préparait une exposition), je ressentis ce léger vertige qu’on ressent à s’approcher volontairement du danger, tout en sachant pertinemment que je ne risquais rien, car j’étais le seul à connaître l’issue déchirante de notre relation. (FA, 143–144, emphasis mine)88

important image schemas”, besides others such as container, balance, centre-periphery, cycle, part-whole and the like (see 217). 84 “I would constantly feel her magnetic power” (ML, 97). 85 “[. . .] my mouth had felt drawn to her mouth” (ML, 17). 86 Attraction aims at approaching or uniting with someone; separation implies creating a distance between oneself and someone else. These are opposed directions of motion. 87 “Je m’arrangeais à tout propos à faire prononcer à mes parents le nom de Swann; certes je me le répétais mentalement sans cesse; mais j’avais besoin aussi d’entendre sa sonorité délicieuse et de me faire jouer cette musique dont la lecture muette ne me suffisait pas. [. . .] Les joies que je prenais à l’entendre, je les croyais si coupables qu’il me semblait qu’on devinait ma pensée et qu’on changeait la conversation si je cherchais à l’y amener” (Proust 1954, 413). 88 “But as he [Bernard, ESW] wasn’t questioning me, and Marie was the only thing I’d thought about all day long, I couldn’t help bringing it up first myself [. . .]. And when I said

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Secondly, Marcel’s love for Gilberte is represented in Proust’s novel by Marcel’s imaginary preoccupation with her, by his creation of a “fictive Gilberte”,89 an idea that is intertextually quoted by Toussaint’s autodiegetic narrator in La Vérité sur Marie.90 Is there a slot for INFATUATION in the schema of SEPARATION? In my eyes, there is at least a certain friction between these terms and the novel works toward strengthening this friction. More precisely, the novel creates a certain undecidability concerning the narrator’s emotions for Marie and, as a consequence, also with regard to the presumable emplotment (especially with regard to the ending of this crisis). For instance, while the narrator suggests, on the one hand, that he is in love with Marie, labelling her even explicitly “my love” (“elle pleurait, mon amour, le visage enfouis dans un volant de robe”, FA, 22), he insinuates, on the other hand, that his love for her is dying (“J’ai regardé la larme se dissiper sur sa joue, et j’ai fermé les yeux – en pensant que peut-être, en effet, je ne l’aimais plus”, FA, 32).91 The narrator even tempts the reader to infer from the information given that he could even go so far as to hurt her physically.92

Marie’s name, with that secret sensual pleasure that comes from speaking in public of those you love (I spoke of her with absolute composure, in a completely normal tone, to say merely that she’d stayed in Tokyo because she was preparing for an exhibition), I felt that slight vertigo you get from willingly courting danger, although I knew for a fact that I ran no risk at all, because only I was aware of the wrenching end of our relationship” (ML, 91–92). 89 “J’avais l’étonnement d’apercevoir au fond de moi-même, un jour un sentiment, le jour suivant un autre, généralement inspirés par telle espérance ou telle crainte relatives à Gilberte. À la Gilberte que je portais en moi. J’aurais dû me dire que l’autre, la réelle, était peut-être entièrement différente de celle-là, ignorait tous les regrets que je lui prêtais, pensait probablement beaucoup moins à moi seulement que moi à elle, mais que je ne la faisais elle-même penser à moi quand j’étais seul en tête à tête avec ma Gilberte fictive [. . .]” (Proust 1954, 627). 90 “[. . .] il me fallait imaginer sa présence à l’étage supérieur et la faire naître dans mon esprit. Alors, derrière mes yeux fermés, elle prenait corps progressivement, se détachant lentement de sa chrysalide pour apparaître dans mon esprit [. . .]” (VM, 185). “[. . .] Marie descendait les escaliers [. . .], et je vis la porte de ma chambre s’ouvrir et Marie apparaître devant moi dans le noir, se dépouillant de sa dimension imaginaire pour s’incarner dans le réel, quittant les limbes de mon esprit où j’étais en train d’imaginer ce qu’elle était en train de faire pour s’incarner devant moi en réalité de chair” (VM, 204). Rocheville (2016) elaborates on the relationship between actuality and virtuality in Toussaint’s prose. She argues that “Faire l’amour relance en quelque sorte une théorie de la plus-value: plus le coefficient de virtualité d’un objet est élevé, plus cet objet augmente sa valeur réelle aux yeux du narrateur” (Rocheville 2016, 233). 91 “I watched the tear vanish on her cheek, and I closed my eyes – thinking that maybe, after all, I did not love her anymore” (ML, 18). 92 “[J]e me lançais dans des calculs compliqués [. . .] pour [. . .] ne pas me laisser submerger par la montée de violence que je sentais grandir en moi” (FA, 40). And some sentences later: “Étaisje revenu dans la chambre? J’étais assis à côté d’elle, le flacon d’acide chlorhydrique ouvert à la main” (FA, 41; see also 23).

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The tension that results from this schematic friction and undecidability governs the whole tetralogy (although the signs indicating his love for Marie increase, especially in the third and in the fourth novel93). The importance of the question to know whether he loves her or not may be underpinned by the fact that this is the issue of the very last sentence of the whole tetralogy.94 When Faire l’amour was published, however, this ending was still unknown (at least by readers) and the first volume of the tetralogy remains essentially ambiguous95 as to the narrator’s feelings and the possible ending of their relationship. This may be explained by the way text elements resist fitting smoothly into any of the activated schemata. Consider, for instance, the central question associated with the concept of SEPARATION as the global macrostructure of the narrative. Will they separate or not? When the narrator reveals in a prolepsis that, during their first night in Tokyo, they had made love for the last time, he seems to answer this question. But already in the next sentence, which is separated by the first one by a break,96 he brings up a question that shakes this security: “Mais combien de fois avions-nous fait l’amour ensemble pour la dernière fois? Je ne sais pas,

93 In the third volume, the narrator’s lack of knowledge about what really happened between Marie and Jean-Baptiste seems to bother him to the point that he bridges his epistemic gaps by pure inventions (see, as an example, FA, 165–166). Here, the narrator recounts how he has confessed his love to Marie, but soundlessly, kneeing secretly and solitarily on the roof of the ‘Contemporary Art Space’ of Shinagawa at the evening of the opening of Marie’s exposition, watching her through a little oculus (see Nue, 81). 94 The narrator and Marie, pregnant as she is at that point of the story, lie on a bed in the house of Marie’s deceased father, reunited. They are kissing and Marie – how could it be otherwise? – is weeping; finally, she asks “with a kind of astonishment ‘So you do love me?’” (“[. . .] avec une sorte d’étonnement: ‘Mais, tu m’aimes, alors?’”, Nue, 170). 95 Insofar as I have associated ambiguity with narrative projection (see chapter 4), it is necessarily to clarify shortly the difference between the two narrative dynamics in the present context. From my point of view, the main difference resides in the validity of the respective activated schemata. As I have explained with regard to the construction of viewpoint in Les Liaisons dangereuses, narrative projection lives by the simultaneous activation of several mental spaces (e.g. character perspectives), which are all valuable and do not exclude each other. In other words, it is perfectly natural that Valmont, Tourvel, Merteuil and Émile experience the events from their own perspectives; what is remarkable, however, is the fact that one and the same textual passage manages to activate all of them at the same time. The narrativity of Toussaint’s tetralogy, by contrast, lives by the activation of rivalling schemata, which refuse to comply with each other: being together and being separated, attraction and repulsion are contrary schemata that keep readers from creating a coherent narrative schema – and provoke them to engage in processes of coherence in progress (narrativity in actualisation). 96 The textual structure thus foreshadows, in a way, the development of the protagonists’ relationship.

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souvent. Souvent . . . ” (FA, 16).97 Or consider the “danger” or “menace”, which is often evoked by the narrator. It is activated by means of its repeated, explicit mention, but the context does not offer unambiguously an element that would render this “menace” more precise. On the one hand, the concept of menace, separated from the surrounding text by breaks, remains semantically unfilled (see the isolated sentence “Et, peu à peu, la menace s’était précisée”, FA, 38).98 On the other hand, there are, throughout the novel, several possible ways of answering the question of what this menace precisely consists of.99 It is important to note that it is the composition of the novel that triggers such questions. Pursuing these questions aims at disambiguating the semantics offered by the novel, in order to make them fit into a familiar, plot-related schema (such as SEPARATION, CRIME, etc.). In other words, the novel cues readers to negotiate between their knowledge structures and the narrative elements offered in order to find out what the novel is about, how the story will develop and what its coherence is. It should be noted, however, that Toussaint’s novels provoke processes of coherence in progress not only by means of resistant macro schemata. According to my analysis, Faire l’amour, for example, invites readers to create a micro-level rhizome of interconnected isotopic meanings that underlies (and/or cuts transversally through) its rivalling plot frames. Figure 20 represents a selective cut-out from this semantic network whose nodes are represented by

97 “But how many times had we made love together for the last time? I don’t know, lots of times. Lots. . .” (ML, 8). 98 “And little by little, the threat had become clearer” (ML, 22). Interestingly, the sentence encodes semantically the contrary of what the discourse performs: the menace is not rendered more precise within the novel. 99 Is it the danger of separation? Or the danger of Marie’s face being corroded by the acid, as insinuated at the very beginning? Is it the danger of the narrator hurting himself with the acid (see FA, 11, 38)? Is it a real, objective danger that comes along with the earthquakes (see FA, 86–87)? Is it the danger that the earthquake represents, on a metaphorical level, for their relationship? Is it the danger of the violence of the narrator’s feelings for her (“Je tentais de résister à la violence des sentiments qui me portaient vers Marie”, FA, 167)? Or is it the narrator’s psyche that is in danger (“Mais où étais-je?”, FA, 40) – overchallenged by Marie’s demands and repeated questions, wrecked by her violent emotionality, by her “oceanic condition” (Nue, 36)? Just as in the case of the narrator’s love, the text provides us with evidence for more than one possibility, with more than one semantic connection, making it difficult to answer respective questions unequivocally. Inasmuch as there is more than one narrative element susceptible of filling the schema slot of MENACE, this narrative dynamic resembles slightly the strategy of ‘narrative projection’ (see chapter 4), but there is an important difference: readers presumably do not project all narrative elements onto the same slot, but rather try to find out which one is the “right” slot value (see above).

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Figure 20: Semantic network connections in Faire l’amour.

isotopic crossroads. Deleuze and Guattari’s “principle of connection” comes into play here insofar as each and every point (or node) in this isotopic web can indeed “be connected to anything other, and must be” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 7).100 Figure 20 puts LIQUID in a relatively central position, since it connects many narrative elements.101 In Faire l’amour, liquid represents an isotopy that inheres in the description of the weather outside (rain, the melting and dripping

100 The network represented in Figure 20 could be established in many different ways, not only because many other items would have to be added in order to achieve completeness, but because Toussaint’s stories have no centre and no periphery, or, in other words, no hierarchy (see above). 101 Recently, Demanze (2016) has highlighted the importance of the imagery of liquid substances for an understanding of Toussaint’s prose in terms of meditativeness: “C’est dire que la pensivité chez Jean-Philippe Toussaint a sans doute fortement partie liée à l’eau, ses flux, son cours, comme s’il s’agissait de rejouer dans un imaginaire élémentaire la tradition humorale de la mélancolie pensive” (Demanze 2016, 255–256).

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snow)102 and in Marie’s tears. Marie’s tears are in turn connected with emotions – not only with sadness and agitation (which, for their part, are connected with the schema of SEPARATION), but also with joy, since Marie also cries when she is very happy (and in love, see FA, 13). LIQUID is also frequently invoked in terms of sexuality and desire (e.g., “son sexe mouillé de désir”, FA, 90)103 and in terms of violence or aggressiveness, namely via the viol filled with muriatic acid (“ce flacon de liquide ambré et corrosif”, FA, 11).104 What is important to note in this context is that these connections between LIQUID and other semantic entities are completed by a large variety of further interconnections, for example between sexuality, violence and the acid (“à mesure que l’étreinte durait, que le plaisir sexuel montait en nous comme de l’acide, je sentais croître la terrible violence sous-jacente de cette étreinte”, FA, 34),105 violence and desire (“la violence de son désir me faisait peur”, FA, 90),106 liquid, tears, the viol and a lustre (“trois lustres d’une amplitude spectaculaire [. . .], leur forme évoquait des flacons [. . .], leur éclat avait quelque chose de fluide et d’aquatique, et c’était peut-être à des gouttes d’eau géantes finalement qu’ils faisaient le plus penser, ou à des larmes, mon amour”, FA, 105–106)107 and between tears and trembling (“une larme immobile, [. . .], qui tremblait tragiquement sur place, [. . .] qui, à force de trembler à la frontière du tissue, finit par éclater sur la peau de sa joue”, FA, 31)108 – to give just a little insight into the large, densely woven web of semantic interconnections of Faire l’amour. This isotopic web is the result of the narrative’s “ana- and cataphorical relations” (Warning 2001, 179), which inhere in the text as a meaning potential and which readers are invited to explore, independently from the narrative’s sequential shape; it represents an example for what Warning calls “paradigmatic” narrativity. This web represents a kind of “isotopic coherence” (Rubino 2012, 78), a system of

102 “Les lecteurs de Jean-Philippe Toussaint l’ont remarqué depuis longtemps, il pleut beaucoup dans ses romans. [. . .] Du moment qu’il y a un mouvement d’eau, robinet qui goutte ou urine, la pensée peut suivre son cours” (Demanze 2016, 255). 103 “[. . .] her sex wet with desire” (ML, 57). 104 “[. . .] this corrosive amber liquid” (ML, 5). 105 “And as the coupling continued, as sexual pleasure rose in us like acid, I felt the terrible violence underlying that coupling increase” (ML, 19). 106 “[. . .] the violence of her desire frightened me” (ML, 56). 107 “[. . .] three chandeliers of spectacular size [. . .], their shape reminiscent of decanters for liqueur [. . .], their splendor was in some way fluid, aquatic, and in the end perhaps they most resembled giant water drops, or tears, my love” (ML, 76–68). 108 “[. . .] a motionless tear [. . .] trembling tragically in place [. . .] that, through quivering so long at the edge of the cloth, finally burst on the skin of her cheek” (ML, 17).

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“echoes” (Stump 2006, 107) or an “intricate network of parallels” (Stump 2006, 106) and can be understood as an instance of ‘performative’ narrativity (see Chapter 2) insofar as the text’s “inherent system of references” (“textimmanentes [. . .] Referenzsystem”, Jacobs 1994, 348) has to be actively detected by the reader. It inheres in the text as a potential, but it is up to the reader to find an “entryway” into this semantic rhizome, to explore its expanse and its multiplicity of interconnections, thereby engaging in processes of coherence in progress. Inasmuch as the discourse, which represents this semantic web, is focalised through the autodiegetic narrator, one can interpret this semantic connectivity as the narrator’s projection of emotional issues on the world surrounding him,109 thereby creating a metaphorical access to the world. For example, the fact that the narrator, on his way to the swimming pool on the twenty-seventh floor of the hotel, evokes the luminescent green sign of the emergency exit three times (“EXIT, EXIT, EXIT”, FA, 43) can be interpreted as being due to his preoccupation with the subject of separation, of “getting out” of this relationship where the distress that Marie and he cause each other has become unbearable (“le peu de mal que nous nous faisions nous était devenu insupportable”, FA, 82).110 But if this rhizomatic semantic connectivity, which replaces schemacompliant and hierarchical plot structures, is ascribed to the focalisation of the narrator (who is both constitutive for the level of discourse and a crucial character in the storyworld), then we have definitely arrived at a point of our analysis where tellability can not be theoretically restricted to the story level any more, as it has been proposed by Ryan (1991). Strictly speaking, it would also be false to say that the levels of story and discourse, of narrative composition and narrative content, are inextricably intertwined in Toussaint’s novels – it would be more correct to say that the narrative composition, as analysed above via rhizomatic semantics, becomes the narrative content. To put it a bit differently, the tellability (or narrative interest) has been displaced from the ‘story’ level to the interplay of story and discourse. The inclusion of narrative discourse into the notion of tellability in the context of Toussaint’s novels can be supported by the analyses of scholars who argue, for instance, that Toussaint’s resistance against traditional plot structures and plot-related tension foregrounds the novels’ textuality and linguistic quality: “Dans cette mesure, on peut dire que restreindre l’intrigue, refuser une forme de tension narrative axée sur l’événement, tout cela revient à augmenter le texte. La réduction de la diégèse et de la narrativité mène à la dilatation de la

109 For example, the lustre is associated with tears, which are strongly related to Marie. 110 “[. . .] the little harm we did to ourselves had become unbearable” (ML, 52).

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phrase, de la langue elle-même, qui s’étend afin de contenir le sens” (Huglo and Leppik 2010, 36).111 In 1995, Motte has made a related point with regard to Toussaint’s early novels. He considers the textual, compositional level as the prevailing place of Toussaint’s narrativity as well. Just as Huglo and Leppik, he derives this fact from the poorness of the story: “Yet, insofar as La Salle de bain can be said to be ‘about’ anything, it is about experience. [. . .] the poverty and banality of the narrator’s experience encourage the reader of La Salle de bain to consider that artifact as textuality, as écriture (rather than as representation of the larger world), and to reflect in a sustained manner on the reading experience” (Motte 1995, 757).112 Besides the “flat multiplicity” of the isotopic network, there is another ‘rhizomatic’ quality that makes Toussaint’s novels “tellable”. Deleuze and Guattari call it “metamorphosis”, “all manner of becomings” (see 1988, 21) or “flows” (22; see also section 1.2.2).113

6.3.4 Semantic becomings In narratives that perform primarily “representationalist narrativity”, one can find, according to Todorov’s approach, a threefold sequence, which leads to closure or to a semantic halt. An initial equilibrium is disturbed and thus leads to narrative actions, which then result in the establishment of a new equilibrium (see chapter 2). One could describe this closure also as change of state according to which the new state finishes a narrative action or transformation; due to the achievement of the new state, the development comes to a halt. If Faire l’amour activates the schema of SEPARATION, it also creates the expectation of such a closed plot, which leads from one state (BEING IN A LOVE RELATIONSHIP) to another (BEING SEPARATED) via events that constitute the transition between

111 “In this connection, one can say that the restriction of the plot, the rejection of a form of narrative tension that would be centred on the event amounts to valorising the text [in its textuality, ESW]. The reduction of both the diegesis and of the narrativity leads to a dilatation of the sentence, of language itself, which begins to expand in order to assume meaning” (Huglo and Leppik 2010, 36, translation mine). 112 If Toussaint’s novels thus free themselves from a norm of tellability that demands eventfulness on the level of the story, they can be said to be rhizomatic not only with regard to their semantic network structures, but also with regard to the fact that they mismatch the “arborescent” and asymmetrical dichotomy of story and discourse, which inheres in the concept of ‘tellability’. 113 This aspect touches the sixth aspect of tellability, what I called its “mode” (punctual versus extended tellability, prefabricated tellability versus tellability in progress, see section 6.5).

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these two states (process of SEPARATION). But the novel refuses explicitly to comply with this narrative schema structure: “Mais rompre, je commençais à m’en rendre compte, c’était plutôt un état qu’une action, un deuil qu’une agonie” (FA, 129).114 The conceptual structure of SEPARATION, which the narrator provides with a conceptual STATE structure, is not only inconsistent with the schema structure as it is presumably stored in the “encyclopaedic”115 knowledge of readers (CHANGE-OF-STATE structure), but it is also opposed to semantic closure, since a state, by itself, does not come to an end. On the one hand, the tellability and narrativity of Faire l’amour is thus constituted negatively, namely by the readerly experience of a resistance that the narrative elements oppose to activated schemata – be it abstract plot schemata that imply a semantic halt (NARRATIVE as the narration of a CHANGE OF STATE) or concrete plot schemata (SEPARATION, LOVE); on the other, narrativity and tellability can be actively engendered (“positively”, so to speak), by the readerly exploration of a rhizomatic semantic network. Nonetheless, the isotopic rhizome of Faire l’amour is opposed to semantic closure as well – not only because such a rhizomatic network allows for any number of run-throughs, but also because its rhizomatic semantics are not restricted to Faire l’amour. In his article “Toussaint Unfinished”, Stump makes a related claim. Analysing (primarily) the first two novels of what later became a tetralogy, Stump identifies a “coherent creative stance: an opposition to ends and ending, and a championing of mutability and potential” (Stump 2006, 100). As far as I see, he identifies four levels of this “opposition to ends”. The first level concerns micro-events (i.e., what I referred to as ‘n-1’). Inasmuch as Toussaint’s micro events are not attributable to an organising plot schema, they lack unity and therefore closure. The second level is intertextual, concerning semantic interactions between particular novels. In this context, Stump draws specifically on Faire l’amour and on Fuir as its sequel: [. . .] endlessness or unfinishedness takes on a particularly concrete form: the first book is over, and then it is over no more. And this is true not only because that first novel’s story is continued in the second, but also because, on finishing Fuir, the reader is compelled to go back and reread Faire l’amour, to look for points of contact [. . .], to ponder their meaning, and perhaps to scour the one book in search of illumination of the events found in the other. (Stump 2006, 109)

The novels and their continuity raise a number of questions and “the fact that they can be posed means that the elements of the first novel, which ‘end’ when

114 “But breaking up, I was beginning to realize, was more a state of being than an action, more a period of a mourning than a death agony” (ML, 82). 115 I am alluding here to Eco’s (1990) terminology.

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that novel ends, have now been in a sense brought back to life, ready for revisiting, rethinking, reinterpreting“ (Stump 2006, 110). According to Stump, the second volume invites us to such activities of reinterpretation, thus enabling us to discover “an astonishingly complex set of interactions, correspondences, and divergences, and an intriguing meditation on the subject of endings, in life and especially in literature” (104). Stump interprets the possibility of establishing semantic connections between the novels not only as a potential inherent in the texts, but also as an authorial strategy, even as a writerly statement. He thus claims a third kind of unfinishedness on the level of Toussaint’s poetology: “Writing means going on. It means the opposite [. . .] of definition and closure” (101). Additionally, Stump notices that readers are free to renounce a connectivist reading and interpretation and to read the two volumes simply as “beautiful, complicated love stories” (110). Considered from this perspective, Toussaint’s poetology even implies a (fourth) kind of unfinishedness, which can be found on the level of interpretation: “the novel does not really tell us how we are supposed to read it, and so we are free to oscillate between the two readings, or to reread the books in a manner contrary to our first reading, and so on” (110). According to Stump, Toussaint’s novels thus trigger processes of coherence in progress, which are experienced by the reader due to an authorial poetics of non-closure and provoked by the disfiguration of the story and intertextual “blanks” (in Iser’s sense). Although the rhizomatic, narrative ‘connectivity’, as illustrated selectively in Figure 20, identifies only a section of the semantic web of a single novel, it has to be noted – with a side glance to Stump’s second level of unfinishedness – that such rhizomatic networks extend beyond the limits of Faire l’amour and also beyond the limits of the tetralogy. It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed analysis of all the semantic nodes that are interconnected throughout the whole corpus of Toussaint’s novels.116 Nonetheless, I would like to illustrate my claim by giving at least a few examples of semantic connections between Toussaint’s novels, especially between Faire l’amour and La Salle de bain, ranging from more obvious (since frequent) semantic nodes to less obvious, punctual, minute semantic interactions. While Stump emphasises the differences between Toussaint’s earlier work (his “minimalist” phase) and his last novels, the following analysis tends to highlight the continuities in Toussaint’s novels in terms of common semantic structures. As it has often been stated, the most frequently activated conceptual node throughout Toussaint’s work is LIQUID, especially in the form of water, often evoked as rain or as a swimming pool, a lake or the sea. In La Salle de bain, it

116 Schneider (2014, 26–27), however, provides some examples.

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rains (see SB, 31–32, 37–38) and the narrator, who looks out of the window onto the street, has – again an allusion to Proust?117 – “the impression that all these people are located in an aquarium” (BR, 29).118(“j’eus soudain l’impression que tous ces gens se trouvaient dans un aquarium”, SB, 32). In this novel, the LIQUID or FLUIDITY node, exemplified by the falling rain, but also by the “dame blanche”(“White Lady”, BR, 7), “a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a coat of scalding chocolate” (BR, 7), “le chaud et le froid, la consistance et la fluidité” (SB, 15),119 participates in another rhizomatic network, which is not foregrounded in the Marie series. As it is has been sufficiently analysed in the research literature, LIQUID in La Salle de bain is linked to the idea of movement versus stasis (“immobilité”, SB, 38),120 which, in turn, is related to the frightening ideas of the time that flies (“C’est moi qui [ . . . .] avais eu soudain peur du mauvais temps, alors que c’était l’écoulement même du temps, une fois de plus, qui m’avait horrifié”, SB, 33)121 and of mortality (“l’immobilité [. . .] entraîne continument les corps vers la mort, qui est immobilité. Olé”, SB, 38). This semantic connection between water (as LIQUID) and death is condensed in the actualisation of the frame VENICE, where the narrator of La Salle de bain travels.122 Rhizomatic connections, which can be found more easily in both La Salle de bain and Faire l’amour, concern the nature of the relationship between the respective narrator protagonists and their girlfriends. These connections evolve around the semantic nodes of LOVE, VIOLENCE and SPEECHLESSNESS. So far, we have examined some examples that show how LOVE and VIOLENCE codetermine the narrator’s relationship to Marie in Faire l’amour, but also SPEECHLESSNESS plays a decisive role.123 The dimension of speechlessness becomes quite explicit when the narrator states: “Nous ne disions rien – nous ne nous parlions plus” (FA, 82),124 thereby introducing some general reflections upon the status quo of

117 See the opera scene in Le Coté de Guermantes (Proust 1988, 33–37). 118 [. . .] j’eus soudain l’impression que tous ces gens se trouvaient dans un aquarium” (SB, 32). 119 “[. . .] hot and cold, substance and fluidity” (BR, 7). 120 Schulte Nordholt (2016) argues that the protagonists incarnate the two poles of movement and immobility, Marie being characterised by the former, the narrator protagonist by the latter. 121 “It was I who [. . .] had suddenly felt afraid of the bad weather, when what had really terrified me, once again, was the passing of time itself” (BR, 20–21). 122 See also Asholt (1994, 26). Water also occurs (more or less prominently) in the other novels, for instance in La Télévision (the narrator swims in the lake ‘Halensee’ in Berlin; he has the duty to water the plants of his neighbours), in La Réticence (Sasuelo is an island, and the dead cat, object of his paranoiac investigation, floats on the water in the harbour), in La vérité sur Marie and in Nue, where Marie and the narrator swim in the Mediterranean Sea. 123 The aspect of speechlessness has already been put forward by Schmidt (2001, 47–59). 124 “We didn’t say anything, we’d stopped talking to one another” (ML, 51–52).

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their relationship. But it also becomes evident in their earlier verbal exchanges, which are generally characterised by questions or orders from Marie – and by no (or very sparse) answers from the narrator.125 Consider, for example, the night where the narrator and Marie are wandering the cold and wet streets of Tokyo, quarrelling. When the umbrella falls down on the ground, it becomes the object of a power struggle. “Ramasse-le, dit-elle. Je ne dis rien. Ramasse-le, répéta-t-elle. Je la regardai dans les yeux, lui plantai mon plus mauvais regard dans les yeux. [. . .] je fis demi-tour, me remis en route sans un mot” (FA, 81–82).126 Indeed, it is often the narrator’s speechlessness that seems to cause Marie’s violence. When the narrator interrupts his intimacy with Marie, in consequence of the sudden message “You have a fax” appearing on the blue television screen, all he says is: “We have received a fax”. Then he adds: Je voulus dire quelque chose, m’expliquer, lui prendre le bras pour la calmer, lui caresser la joue, mais mes efforts pour la consoler ne faisaient que la hérisser davantage, le simple contact de mes mains sur sa peau lui faisait horreur. Prise de convulsions sur le lit, elle me repoussait des pieds et des mains en me hurlant de foutre le camp. Tu me dégoûtes, répétait-elle, tu me dégoûtes. (FA, 36)127

The combination of LOVE, VIOLENCE and SPEECHLESSNESS can also be found in La Salle de bain, especially in the Venice episode where the narrator and Edmondsson stop talking whenever they cannot reach any agreement (see SB, 82, paragraph 50). It seems as if there are times where the narrator cannot handle Edmondsson’s (or, more generally, human) closeness, neither her gaze128 nor her attempts to chatter.129 In such phases, his verbal refusal goes so far that he refuses to provide his phrases with syntactical arguments, i.e. to fill conceptual

125 “Pourquoi tu ne veux pas m’embrasser? me demanda alors Marie à voix basse [. . .]. Je continuais de regarder dehors sans répondre. Au bout d’un moment, [. . .] je répondis que je n’avais jamais dit que je ne voulais pas l’embrasser.” And a bit later: “Je faillis ajouter quelque chose, mais je ne dis rien [. . .].” (FA, 19). See also 88–89. 126 “Pick it up, she said. I didn’t say anything. Pick it up, she repeated. I stared her smack in the eye, with my nastiest look, smack in the eye. [. . .] turning around, I set out again in silence” (BR, 51). 127 “I tried to talk to her, explain, stroke her face, hold her arm to calm her down, but my attempts at consolation only upset her even more, and she recoiled in horror at the simple touch of my hands. Shaking convulsively on the bed, she kicked and slapped me away from her, screaming at me to fuck off. You disgust me, she kept saying, you disgust me” (ML, 21). 128 “[. . .] son regard posé sur moi me dérangeait. Je lui demandai gentiment de ne plus me regarder” (SB, 85; see also 94, paragraph 73). 129 “[. . .] elle me demanda ce que je pensais de l’œuvre de ce peintre. [. . .] comme elle me répétait la question, je lui avouais que je n’avais plus envie de porter de jugement sur la peinture” (SB, 84).

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slots of verbs or propositions.130 The act of violence that he ultimately performs by throwing a dart at her forehead is introduced by the statement that he did not wish to talk any more.131 Indeed, it seems to be Edmondsson’s insistent ignorance of his need for “isolation” (see SB, 94, paragraph 73), i.e. her verbal and visual approaches, that lead to the act of violence. Despite this eruption of aggression, they maintain their LOVE relationship.132 Finally, there are some finer-grained correspondences between the novels. We have already mentioned Toussaint’s foregrounding of objects, i.e. the “thingness” of things in Toussaint’s novels. Although these objects are quite different in each novel (the bathtub in La Salle de bain; le viol filled with acid in Faire l’amour), the narrators perform the same gestures associated with these objects. At the end of La Salle de bain, for instance, the narrator comes to the conclusion that “it was not very healthy, at age twenty-seven going on twenty-nine, to live more or less shut up in a bathtub. I ought to take some risk, I said [. . .], stroking the enamel of the bathtub [. . .]” (BR, 101). This gesture of caressing the central object of the novel is repeated at the beginning of Faire l’amour; again, the context of this gesture is a certain “risk” or “danger” insofar as Marie suggests that the acid could end up in her face. Thereupon, the narrator replies: “Non, je ne crois pas, Marie, et, de la main, sans la quitter des yeux, je caressais doucement le galbe du flacon dans la poche de ma veste.” (FA, 12).133 What distinguishes the two gestures, however, is that the caressing of the curve of the viol in the respective context evokes in nuce the whole semantic rhizome of Faire l’amour, with all its incompatibilities. The combination of the lexical items “Marie”, “to caress” and “curve” actualises a schema of sexual intimacy between Marie and the narrator; the combination of “Marie”, the “flacon” and the flacon being hidden in his pocket and secretly caressed – as if the narrator’s affection would have been transferred from Marie’s body to this object and/or its content –, on the contrary, activates a schema according to which Marie is in danger and could be severely hurt (instead of being caressed). The search for such isotopic parallels is not an end itself; it can bring to light interpretative cues that cannot be found in only one particular novel.

130 “Je lui demandais de me consoler. D’une voix douce, elle me demandait de quoi je voulais être consolé. Me consoler, disais-je. Mais de quoi, disait-elle. Me consoler, disais-je [. . .]” (SB, 92–93). “Je devais prendre un risque, disais-je [. . .], le risque de compromettre la quiétude de ma vie abstraite pour. Je ne terminai pas ma phrase” (SB, 131). 131 “Je n’avais plus envie de parler” (SB, 94, paragraph 74). 132 Later, in the hospital: “Nous nous embrassâmes dans le couloir blanc” (SB, 97). 133 “No, I don’t think so, Marie, and with my hand, without taking off my eyes of her, I would gently caress the curve of the bottle in my jacket pocket” (BR, 5).

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Consider, for instance, paragraph sixty-eight of La Salle de bain: “Lorsque, le matin, je me réveillais, je voyais la journée à venir comme une mer sombre derrière mes yeux fermés, une mer infinie, irrémissiblement figée” (SB, 92).134 This is a difficult sentence inasmuch as the concept of OCEAN refuses to comply with the idea of something being “figé” (“stiff”). Is the sea not rather characterised by the opposite of “stiff” – by extreme mutability and by quick change? Is the sea not the place where nothing is fixed (such that ships need an anchor in order to fix their position)? In other words, STIFFNESS resists fitting into the conceptual slots of SEA. What might help us interpret this sentence, however, is a passage from Fuir where the same semantic connection reappears. In a very long sentence, the narrator, who listens to Marie on the phone, describes his experience of listening to her. Her voice and words carry him off mentally and stimulate the memory of former mental states: “[. . .] des sensations, de froid, de chaud, d’être aimé, [. . .] et un ébranlement, comme une lézarde, dans la mer de larmes séchées qui est gelée en nous” (F, 52, emphasis mine).135 Does it make sense to transfer the idea of a “sea of tears frozen in each of us” to the passage from La Salle de bain? This seems indeed to be helpful, since already in the next paragraph the narrator asks Edmondsson – with his eyes closed!136 – to console him and then quotes Pascal’s reflections about the “miserable” human condition. The evocation of the “endless sea” that is “unforgivably stiff” in La Salle de bain can thus be interpreted, in terms of this internovelistic connectivity, as anticipating the narrator’s state of mind of the next day, namely a deep sadness (“sea of tears”), without any concrete object, which is opposed to emotional warmth (“frozen in each of us”) and calls for consolation.

134 “Waking in the morning, I would see the day ahead from behind closed eyes like a dark sea, an infinite, irremissibly frozen sea” (BR, 70). The translators’ decision to render “mer figée” as “frozen sea” is a decision against literal translation, which is however, as my following analysis will show, very legitimate and well-grounded. 135 “[. . .] sensations – of coldness, of heat, of being loved [. . .] and we feel ourselves shaken, as if a fissure had cracked the sea of tears frozen in each of us” (RA, 44). Interestingly, Toussaint describes the effect of Marie’s voice on his soul in terms that are quite similar to those used by Kafka in order to describe the effect that literature should have on readers: “un livre doit être la hache destinée à la mer gelée qui est en nous” (letter to Oskar Pollak from the 27th of January 1904, translated by Olivier Mannoni, quoted in Morel and Asholt 2014, 100). 136 Closed eyes semantically comply with the verbal schema TO WEEP, which is semantically connected to the tears mentioned in the passage from Fuir.

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6.4 The slot of ‘function’: Toussaint’s strategy of reappropriation In the previous chapter, I have examined the extent to which Toussaint’s novels, especially Faire l’amour, resist fitting into a specific category of the NARRATIVE schema, namely tellability. In this section, I will focus not on a specific slot of the schema NARRATIVE, but rather on a specific type of schema slots, namely ‘function’ slots. The basic idea behind this approach is that schemata do not only give a structural shape to our encyclopaedic knowledge (we know the conceptual parts of a CHAIR and the holistic gestalt that they create), but that they also save information about uses or functions associated with this schema. Another way of describing this aspect is to say that certain scripts form an essential part of a schema. For a small child, for instance, the schema SPOON it essentially connected with the script of eating something like porridge. SPOON may thus be said to have, in the child’s mind, a function slot according to which the function of the spoon is ‘to transport the porridge from the bowl to the mouth’. This is the use that, for a child, is conceptually associated with the schema SPOON. Many examples with more or less individual function assignments could be cited, for example WINGS are used to fly, PENS are used to write, BOOKS are used to be read. In this chapter, I sustain the hypothesis that Toussaint’s novels present narrative elements that activate certain schemata, but that simultaneously resist filling the function slots associated with these schemata (which might be interpreted, as will be explained below, as a strategy of reappropriation). One can distinguish between two levels where this kind of resistance takes place: on the diegetic level of the story world and on the level of narrative composition.

6.4.1 On the diegetic level The perhaps most obvious and most famous narrative resistance of this kind is related to Toussaint’s first novel, La Salle de bain. This narrative resistance is instantly apparent in the 2005 edition’s cover (Minuit “double”), which depicts a man, clothed with a white shirt, sitting upright in a bathtub. The beginning of the novel directly introduces the reader to the life of a man who spends his afternoons in his bathtub.137 The narrator (and protagonist) uses the bathtub and the

137 “Lorsque j’ai commencé à passer mes après-midi dans la salle de bain, je ne comptais pas m’y installer; non, je coulais là des heures agréables, méditant dans la baignoire, parfois habillé, tantôt nu” (SB, 11).

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bathroom blatantly in a way that is not consistent with the corresponding schemata: a BATHTUB is generally used to take a bath; the BATHROOM is generally used to fulfil one’s hygienic needs (which generally requires a short stay in the bathroom and not entire afternoons). Indeed, the narrative elements stimulate a conceptual blend138 out of the two input schemata BATHROOM and LIVING ROOM, which, according to my analysis, includes a blend of the embedded schemata BATHTUB and SOFA (see Figure 21).

Figure 21: Blending Network of La Salle de bain.

The Generic Space shows what the two input schemata SOFA and BATHTUB have in common: they have – at least partly, on a very abstract level – a similar

138 I refer to the theory and terminology of Fauconnier and Turner (2002).

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shape and are physically used in a similar manner: one can sit or lie on/in it. The two schemata differ from each other with regard to several dimensions of use. As Figure 21 shows, the blended space created by Toussaint’s novel inherits more elements from the SOFA than from the BATHTUB, namely with regard to three aspects: the length of use (a SOFA may well be used for several hours, a BATHTUB usually not), its “dry” use and its function according to which it is a place allowing the pursuit of further recreational activities (such as reading). Concerning the opposition between the dressed versus naked state of the user, the quotation above makes clear that the two states are projected onto the blended space. Although the BATHROOM schema has been preserved by explicit mention, it is first and foremost the functions of the LIVING ROOM that are projected onto the blended space: the narrator does not use the bathroom for hygienic purposes, but for recreation, sociable meetings, reflections, and the like.139 Toussaint plays with the opposition between the two input schemata, especially with their dimensions of use, when he says that Edmondsson thought that there was “something dessicating” (BR, 4) about his refusal to quit the bathroom (“Edmondsson pensait qu’il y avait quelque chose de desséchant dans mon refus de quitter la salle de bain”, SB, 11). Briefly, on the level of the storyworld, the protagonist uses his bathroom and bathtub in a way that is inconsistent with the use or function that readers associate with the corresponding schemata. Narrative elements thus activate our BATHTUB and BATHROOM schemata, but resist fitting into their function slots. Another prominent example of this kind of narrative resistance in La Salle de bain is the narrator throwing a small missile at Edmondsson’s forehead, which causes such a severe injury that she loses consciousness and has to be transported to the hospital (see SB, 94–95). Of course, many objects are susceptible of being misused so as to cause injury, but the small missile is a special case, since darts is a kind of playful simulacrum of archery, a practice in which the arrows have indeed the function of hurting (or even of killing) the hunter’s prey. By directing the small missile toward Edmondsson, hurting her severely, the protagonist repurposes the simulacrum in such a way that it is used like its original. In other words, the protagonist uses the harmless playful copy of what originally (i.e. in prefirearm societies, e.g. antiquity) was used as a dangerous weapon as a weapon (and not, as prescribed by the schema DARTS, as the accessory of a game). Indeed, two narrative elements conceptually prepare this attack on Edmondsson: on the one hand, earlier, before Edmondsson arrives at Venice, the protagonist sharpens the heads of the small missiles with a razor (see SB, 67, paragraph 23), thereby

139 There is, however, an additional overlap between the sofa and the bathtub inasmuch as one also takes a bath for recreational purposes.

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performing an archaic practice that is linked to the original concept of an arrow as a weapon. On the other hand, after Edmondsson’s arrival in Venice, the narrator, who is playing darts, wonders “why the target made me think of Edmondsson and not Jasper Johns” (BR, 68).140 This remark already prepares the conceptual blending of the narrator’s girlfriend and a TARGET (the latter pertaining both to ARCHERY and to DARTS). Forms of narrative resistance that are related to the function of diegetic objects can be found in many of Toussaint’s novels; this is why resistance against the function slot of schemata can be considered as an essential dynamic of Toussaint’s narrativity. To provide some examples, the novel Monsieur, for instance, describes the protagonist’s place of work, but resists filling the central function slot of OFFICE, namely TO WORK: at his place of work Monsieur does everything except work. However, inasmuch as it is possible that the narrator only leaves information about his work out, one could also interpret this as a strategy of narrative ellipsis. We see here that there are fuzzy boundaries between different classes of narrative dynamics. Nonetheless, two aspects are rather indicative of a form of narrative resistance. Firstly, if work represents a narrative gap, the latter does not trigger any tension nor does it cue inferential, gap-filling activities in the reader. The narrative lack of the conceptual value ‘work’ rather creates a crucial mismatch between the activated schema OFFICE (or WORKING PLACE) and the narrative elements of the novel. Such a qualitative mismatch is characteristic of narrative resistance rather than of narrative ellipsis and gap-filling. Secondly, the narrator thematises this mismatch ironically, thereby highlighting the extent to which the narrator’s activities refuse to comply with the functional dimension of the schema WORKING PLACE: Dubois-Lacour, jamais, et il lui en savait gré, n’avait douté du sérieux avec lequel Monsieur travaillait. Vous avez toujours l’air de ne rien foutre, vous, lui disait-elle amicalement à l’occasion, ajoutant, non sans finesse, que c’était là le signe auquel on reconnaissait les vrais grands travailleurs. (M, 13)141

By highlighting the fact that his colleague Dubois-Lacour is not dubious about the seriousness with which Monsieur works, the narrator emphasises implicitly the opposition between Dubois-Lacour’s and the reader’s impression and thus highlights the fact that the narrated events resist fitting into the activated OFFICE

140 “[. . .] je me demandai pourquoi cette cible, plutôt qu’à Jasper Johns, m’avait fait penser à Edmondsson” (SB, 90). 141 “Dubois-Lacour never, and for this he was grateful, doubted the seriousness with which Monsieur approached his work. You always seem to be bone idle, she said to him amiably on occasion, adding, not without finesse, that this was the sign of the truly great worker” (ME, 11).

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schema. A similar example of narrative resistance can be found in La Télévision. This novel recounts the narrator’s stay in Berlin over the summer, thanks to a research grant, which allows the protagonist to write a study on Titian. But instead of using his RESEARCH STAY for research, he does a dozen other things (except for a little, funny episode in the library, see T, 66–73). In L’Appareil-photo, the narrator uses the eponymous CAMERA in a strange way, taking pictures not of things, of people or of himself, but of nothing specific, moving the camera and hitting the shutter release without any target or intentionality (see AP, 102–103). Insofar as he imagines that one of these photographs, taken during the ferry crossing, will provide him with a “self-portrait” (as he conceives of it: “la photo de l’élan furieux que je portais en moi”; AP, 113),142 the narrator creates a mismatch between the specific concept of PHOTOGRAPH as it is schematically constructed via narrative elements (showing abstract colours and structures: “sans moi et sans personne, seulement une présence, [. . .] sans arrièreplan et presque sans lumière”, AP, 112)143 and the function ascribed to it (selfportrait). The novel also triggers a dynamic of narrative resistance with regard to the schema DRIVING SCHOOL – the narrator is frequently there, but makes a dysfunctional use of the institution (he doesn’t take any driving lessons). Faire l’amour contains a variety of minor narrative resistances. Firstly, the flacon is repurposed so as now to carry muriatic acid instead of hydrogen peroxide (“un flacon de verre coloré qui avait contenu auparavant de l’eau oxygenée”, FA, 11).144 The second example concerns the repository of the flacon filled with muriatic acid: the protagonist puts it into the wash bag. Inasmuch as there is clearly no conceptual slot for muriatic acid in the schema of WASH BAG, the fact that the narrator puts it there (see FA, 23–24) represents a minute instantiation of narrative resistance as well. Thirdly, when the narrator and Marie go for a walk in the night after their arrival, wandering about in the streets of Tokyo, their carnivalesque getup can also be deemed an instance of narrative resistance, since they “misuse” their respective clothes. The protagonist wears Marie’s leather coat, which is clearly undersized for him (“quatre fois trop petit pour moi”, FA, 63) and “constricted” his “armpit” (ML, 38; see FA, 61). Instead of shoes, he wears the cloth slippers supplied by the hotel, which have surely not be designed to be used in this manner and become completely soaked by the snow outside (see FA, 63). Marie, on her part, wears (and thus misuses) one of the “twenty-thousand dollar”

142 “[. . .] a photo of the feverish impetus that I carried in me” (C, 98). 143 “[. . .] but without me and without anyone, only a presence, [. . .] without a background and almost without light” (C, 98). 144 “[. . .] a small bottle of colored glass that had once held hydrogen peroxide” (ML, 5).

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(ML, 39) dresses from her collection (which seems to be a huge exaggeration145); the weather-inappropriate dress exposes her shoulders to the falling snow. In Fuir, the most striking instance of use-related narrative resistance occurs at the moment when the narrator listens to Marie on the telephone. He has just learned about the death of her father. He cries silently, without tears,146 and Li Qi appears. The protagonist then takes Li Qi into his arms: “[. . .] je continuais d’entendre la voix de Marie contre ma tempe et je serrais doucement le corps de Li Qi dans mes bras dans une étreinte de deuil et de compassion qui ne lui était pas destinée. Je passai ma main sur ses épaules, caressais ses cheveux pour la réconforter” (F, 53).147 Here, the narrator treats Li Qi as if she were Marie, using gestures that should give solace, although it is not Li Qi who should be consoled, but Marie. Since Marie, however, is bodily absent, he uses Li Qi’s body as a substitute of Marie’s. This, again, is an instance of blending: Marie’s (absent) body is projected onto Li Qi’s (present) body. Correspondingly, Li Qi’s mental state is blended out and replaced by that of Marie, the latter being present through Marie’s voice, the former being absent because of Li Qi’s silence. Another instance of narrative resistance considering the dimension of use or function occurs in the last part of Fuir. What distinguishes this example from the previous examples is the fact that it is a general, encyclopaedic schema against which the narrative opposes resistance, but an individual narrative schema, created by the novel itself. The narrator joins Marie at the isle of Elba; this stay on the isle serves a specific purpose (i.e., has a specific function), at least for Marie: he should accompany her during her father’s funeral. The protagonist indeed shows up at the church at the beginning of the funeral, but then disappears, thereby leaving Marie alone. It seems as if he wants to resist fitting into Marie’s (and the readers’) expectations. This is, perhaps, interpretable as a way of depragmatising himself, i.e. of freeing himself from the functions that are assigned to him within his relationship. In La Vérité sur Marie and Nue, it is the level of narrative composition rather than the diegetic level that becomes the place of narrative resistance. Before turning to this subject in the next subchapter, I would like to highlight one further 145 This exaggeration is as extreme as that of the lustre, which is supposed to be three or four meters broad and between eight and ten meters high (see FA, 105). Inasmuch as these numbers resist complying with what we know and expect these things to cost or to measure, these exaggerations also represent a kind of resistance, albeit non-related to the functional dimensions of concepts discussed in this chapter. 146 This, again, is a form of structural (i.e., not use- or function-related) narrative resistance, since crying conceptually implies the shedding of tears. 147 “[. . .] I continued to hear Marie’s voice in my head and I was gently squeezing Li Qui in my arms in an embrace both of mourning and compassion that wasn’t meant for her. I was rubbing her shoulders, running my fingers through her hair to comfort her” (RA, 45).

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instance of diegetic narrative resistance in Fuir. In La Vérité sur Marie, the narrator tells stories about what happens to Marie, Jean-Christophe de G. and Zahir (JeanChristophe’s pure-blooded racehorse), especially about the problems of getting Zahir to board the plane. The narrator then recounts how Zahir, finally loaded into the plane, experiences the tumultuous flight (there is a violent storm shaking the plane), describing especially the horse’s experience of nausea: “Zahir se sentait mal, il avait la nausée, il était barbouillé. [. . .] Il ne faisait rien, il souffrait, une souffrance vague, légère, écœurante, et pas même une souffrance, une simple nausée, plane, immobile, illimitée” (VM, 136).148 Then, in a single but very long sentence (that exceeds one page), the narrator informs readers about the physics of horses and their bodily functions. He highlights the lack of a specific conceptual slot within the concept of HORSE (or rather of HORSES’ BODILY FUNCTIONS) – they are unable to vomit –, only in order to recount that the impossible event has taken place in the case of Zahir: [. . .] et si, dans la réalité, les chevaux ne vomissent pas, ne peuvent pas vomir (il leur est physiquement impossible de vomir, leur organisme ne le leur permet pas, même quand ils ont mal au cœur, même quand leur estomac est surchargé de substances toxiques), Zahir, [. . .] cette nuit, indifférent à sa nature, traître à son espèce, se mit à vomir dans le ciel dans les soutes du Boeing 747 cargo qui volait dans la nuit. (VM, 137–138)149

This is perhaps the most striking and most extreme example of diegetic narrative resistance that we have encountered so far: a conceptual structure is not only reactivated, but actively constructed by narrative elements (horses cannot use their body in a way that makes them vomit; ‘to vomit’ is not a bodily function (slot) of the concept HORSE); subsequently, the novel provides narrative elements that are qualitatively inconsistent with exactly this schema structure (the intradiegetic horse vomits). This poses a host of questions that are not restricted any longer to the intradiegetic level, but that concern the level of discourse. If the narrator talks about a horse that has properties that “real” horses do not have, do we have to mistrust the narrator – does he lie to us, does he make fun of us? Is he an unreliable narrator? Or do we have to accept that Zahir, the vomiting horse, exists in this specific story world, just like speaking animals exist in the story worlds of fairy tales? Indeed, the narrator seems to highlight his 148 “Zahir felt sick, was nauseous, queasy. [. . .] Zahir did nothing, was suffering, a diffuse feeling of suffering, light, sickening, and not even of suffering, but simply nausea, unwavering, still, limitless” (TM, 107). 149 “[. . .] and, if in reality horses never vomit, their physiognomy won’t allow it, even when they’re nauseated, even when their stomachs are full of toxic substances, Zahir, [. . .] this night, against his own nature, betraying his species, began to vomit in the sky in the hold of a Boeing 747 cargo plane flying through the night” (TM, 108–109).

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demiurgic power by highlighting the fact that he can make things happen, in the fictional reality of his novel, which are impossible in the real world; he thereby destroys en passant the fictive illusion.150 There is another, even more intriguing question. How can the narrator know the mental state – the “haze of consciousness” (TM, 108) – of Zahir? With these questions, we enter a debate that concerns the relationship between the diegetic events described, the extradiegetic narrator and the reader, i.e. matters of narrative composition.

6.4.2 On the level of narrative composition The problematic relationship between intradiegetic facts, the extradiegetic narrator and the reader’s relation to what and how the narrator narrates is indeed not restricted to the episode with Zahir, the horse that vomits against its equine nature, but prevails throughout most of Toussaint’s novels. This problematic element has been repeatedly highlighted in the research literature with regard to the narrator’s perspective151 and mostly analysed as the narrator’s transgression of the narrator’s dominant mode of internal focalisation. As Brandstetter (2006, 196–202), for instance, notes, the narrator intermittently shifts into the position of an omniscient narrator with “zero” focalisation. Such shifts are logically impossible since he is an autodiegetic narrator (see Rajewski 2008, 340); he participates in the storyworld and can thus only talk about his experiences, but not about the interiority, thoughts and feelings of other people – or horses. I would like to dwell on this discussion for three reasons: firstly, because it is worth being mentioned within the frame of my analytic design, not only because matters of focalisation are essential for Toussaint’s narrativity, but also because researchers are discussing whether Toussaint “wrongly uses” techniques of focalisation. The discussion thus indicates a use-related narrative resistance on the level of narrative composition insofar as Toussaint’s novels do not seem to comply with established schemata of focalisation. We will examine whether this is the case by taking into consideration the discursive strategies used in the two most recent novels of the tetralogy (which should help to “update” the discussion). Secondly, this debate is intimately connected with another discussion, which will be explored below (see section 6.5) and which concerns the literary quality of Toussaint’s novels (and, more generally, the new narrative aesthetics he is considered to pertain

150 See sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.6. 151 See, for example, Asholt (1994, 20); Mecke (2000); Schmidt (2001, 128f.); Eberlen (2002, 73); Brandstetter (2006); Rajewski (2008).

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to). While the idea of a “wrong use” of perspectival strategies of representation seems to indicate a devaluating attitude on the part of scholars, other researchers defend this extraordinary use of perspectival tools as innovative and literary. Eberlen identifies, in his analysis of La Salle de bain, the prevailing mode as internally focalised, but notes that the seemingly objective description of the protagonist is reminiscent of an external focalisation (see Eberlen 2002, 173). Brandstetter analyses the perspectival technique in Toussaint’s La Télévision as an intentionally “defective construction of the narratorial perspective” (“fehlerhafte Konstruktion der Erzählperspektive”, Brandstetter 2006, 195), which is purported to be one of a number of strategies of “exposed inauthenticity” (“inszenierte Inauthentizität”). She identifies two main characteristics of this “defective construction”. On the one hand, the perspective of the intradiegetic, ‘narrated I’ is either absent (“fehlende Innenperspektive”, Brandstetter 2006, 197) or incongruent with that of the extradiegetic, ‘narrating I’ (“Eindruck zweier inkongruenter Persönlichkeiten”, 197); the ‘narrating I’ describes the ‘narrated I’ either externally, quasi-objectively (“Je nage lentement, comme une vieille dame”, TV, 11)152 or ironically or erroneously, as when he talks about “my characteristic rigor” (TVE, 72; “avec toute la rigueur qui me caractérise”, TV, 103), which sharply contrasts with the inertia and inconsequence of the ‘narrated I’ (considering primarily his study on Titian, which does not make any progress, or his decision to stop watching television; see Brandstetter 2006, 198). On the other hand, the “richness of detail of certain narrative fragments points to an auctorial mode of narration, i.e. to a heterodiegetic narrator figure with zero-focalisation” (Brandstetter 2006, 200, translation mine) rather than to an internally focalised narrator. Brandstetter illustrates this second instance of a “defective” mode with several examples (see 200–202). One of them is the telephone episode: the narrator gives such a detailed account of Delon’s diving for urchins that it seems as if it has “really” happened in this manner (see TV, 85–89). Another example is the John Dory episode: What John Dory experiences, as a substitute for a psychoanalyst, is so full of details that it can hardly be understood as a report that the narrator remembers (see TV, 108–111). According to Brandstetter, the consequence of these (in Genette’s terminology) “paraleptic” passages, where the narrator is simultaneously homodiegetic and heterodiegetic, internally and externally focalised, is that both the autobiographic and the auctorial perspective become unlikely, reveal themselves as erroneous, incredible constructions. Rajewski (2008) characterises the specificity of Toussaint’s perspectival construction as “diaphanic” (“diaphanes Erzählen”). She assumes that there is an

152 “I swim slowly, like an old woman” (TVE, 4).

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“effect of transparency”, which highlights the fabricated character of the texts, especially the process of narration itself, and therefore shakes narration as such to its foundations (see Rajewski 2008, 330). For Rajewski, “diaphanic” narration is a form of metanarration by means of which the narratorial discourse implicitly pushes itself to the fore. According to Rajewski, the external focalisation is obviously inconsistent with the internally focalised mode of the homodiegetic narrator such that the incongruence has to be noticed by the reader. The blatancy of this inconsistency has the consequence that conventional forms of focalisation (and especially their sources: “real-life frames”) are not only subverted, but brought round to consciousness (see Rajewski 2008, 339). As she argues, the perspectival inconsistencies thus create an awareness of default modes of focalisation and thus also of the discursive dimension of narratives in general (inasmuch as focalisation is a matter of narrative discourse). Rajewski notes that diaphanic narration, while it foregrounds itself, simultaneously does not stop telling a story and creating an effect of immersion. For example, while the narrator’s report of Delon diving in the sea creates vivid images of a fictive reality, readers know that the narrator cannot know all the details that he provides. While readers do thus know that he is transcending the powers of his internally focalised position, this knowledge does not prevent them from processing the pictures created by the narrator; this is why Rajewski qualifies diaphanic narration as implicit. According to Rajewksi, readers become aware of the discursive mediacy of stories, of their own expectations and schemata concerning types of narrators and of narrative conventions in general. This specific kind of metanarration emerges from within the story; fictive immersion and foregrounding of the level of discourse are no longer opposed to each other. Although ‘polymodality’, as theorised by Genette (see Genette 1983, 198–211), is not a new phenomenon – Rajewski quotes Proust’s Recherche, Melville’s Moby Dick, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and “the avant-garde novel” as examples –, Rajewski claims a distinctive quality of this technique in some Minuit authors. In her view, this distinctiveness depends on four features: (i) the inconsistencies are not logically or mimetically explicable; (ii) they are very ostentatious so that they have to be perceived by readers; (iii) they have another literary and theoretical background than polymodality; (iv) and they are linked to the post-avant-garde “return to the story” and thus to the creation of aesthetic illusion (see Rajewski 2008, 336). Before we turn to the problems that are, in my eyes, associated with these approaches, I would like to note where they overlap. To summarise their analyses in my terminology: they all claim that the focalisation that can be found in the respective novels resists fitting into any (so far) established schema of focalisation. The narrative elements of the novels trigger the activation of the schema of autobiographic narration, i.e. of internal focalisation, but then resist

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complying with this modal schema, notably by providing cues for an omniscient narration with zero focalisation. Provided that these approaches represent empirical accounts of how narrative strategies are experienced and understood, one could thus say that, according to their analyses, Toussaint’s (and other authors’) novels are characterised by a narrative resistance on the level of discourse. Although the claim of a narrative resistance on the level of focalisation would perfectly fit into my analytic design, I sustain the oppositional hypothesis that a more detailed analysis of the focalisation in Toussaint’s novels is able to overcome such a narrative resistance. I claim that the narrative elements do comply with a single schema of focalisation, namely with that of internal focalisation. I would like to support my claim by embarking on Brandstetter’s examples, taken from La Télévision: the phone call from Delon and the John Dory episode. As I will argue, these examples are not well suited to illustrate any equality of internal and zero focalisation. The main counterargument that I would like to propose against a narrative resistance associated with focalisation schemata is the fact that the narrator’s descriptions are explicitly marked as imaginary inventions of the narrator. See, for instance, the beginning of his report on Delon’s activities: “Elle se tut, et je les imaginais nager toutes les deux dans une mer immobile, très bleue et transparente [. . .]” (TV, 86, emphasis mine).153 The detailed descriptions of the narrator that follow this remark are obviously imaginative responses to Delon’s words. This is also indicated by the structure of the passage: twice, the narrator begins by rendering Delon’s words and describes his imaginations then, which are obviously stimulated by Delon’s report. It is true that, in the second half of the respective passage, the narrator’s imaginations become more autonomous and then develop freely, i.e. without any (explicitly stated) verbal stimulus from Delon, but the initial qualification of the descriptions as purely imaginary should prevent readers from ascribing any (fictional) factuality to them. Nonetheless, I share Brandstetter’s impression that the wealth of detail gives a factual touch to the narrated. But this factuality is not an “objective” one, ascribable to an omniscient narrator, but a “subjective” one, ascribable only to the (factual) interiority of the autodiegetic narrator; the events are factual only within the confines of his imagination.154

153 She fell silent, and I imagined them both swimming in the still Mediterrean waters, deep blue and clear [. . .]” (TVE, 59–60, emphasis mine). 154 One could ask, in this context, whether these are the imaginations of the ‘narrated’ or of the ‘narrating I’. Could the ‘narrating I’ remember his imaginary creations of those days in such a precise manner? Perhaps not. But this is not the central issue. The point is that none of the two possibilities speaks for an “auctorial” or “omniscient” narrator.

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The narrator’s imagination is the source of a number of imaginary events,155 which might be called (with Mieke Bal)156 ‘hypodiegetic’ insofar as they pertain to a world other than that inhabited by the narrator. Kendall Walton’s analysis of Vanity Fair is also valid for Toussaint’s novels. According to Walton, readers regard this novel [. . .] as establishing two distinct (first-order) work worlds: one in which it is fictional that the narrator tells a story in which it is fictional that various events [. . .] transpire, and one in which it is fictional that those events actually transpire. The reader shifts between two games of make-believe corresponding to the two work worlds, sometimes concentrating on the narrator, the fictional storyteller and his telling of the story, sometimes on the content of the story (although he may be aware of both simultaneously). (Walton 1990, 371)

The impression of factuality noted by Brandstetter pertains to the embedded, hypodiegetic world of events imagined by the narrator, not to the events that “actually transpire”. As to the narrator’s descriptions of John Dory’s experiences in the doctor’s office, they are also qualified as imaginary aggrandisements of what he has been told, but this time this qualification happens a posteriori; moreover, it is not entirely fictional, but is based on the narrator’s own experience. Consider the closure of the respective passage in which the narrator explains: “Je le savais parce que j’avais eu l’occasion d’en voir moi-même quelques-uns [des clients, ESW] un jour que j’avais dû remplacer John au cabinet du docteur von M. [. . .]” (TV, 111).157 Obviously, the narrator blends his own experiences with John Dory’s story, thereby creating a new, imaginatively enriched story with “emergent” structure and “experientiality”. One could describe this “emergent” story world as a hybrid of the intradiegetic world (which is “fictionally factual”158) and the hypodiegetic world of the narrator’s imaginations (the latter being “fictionally fictional”159). All in all, I consider the imaginatively enriched story world as hypodiegetic rather than as a hybrid of hypo-intradiegetic reality, since, in the upshot, the narrator does not “report” events that actually took place in the intradiegetic world he inhabits. The difference between my analysis and those of Brandstetter and Rajewksi can thus be summarised as follows. While they agree that the incongruent type 155 Referring to the position of Frank Wagner, Schulte Nordholt (2016, 146–147) has recently made a similar observation. 156 See Bal (1977, 35). 157 “I knew this because I’d seen several of them [the clients, ESW] one day when I stood in for John at Doctor von M.’s office” (TVE, 78–79). 158 That is, which represents factual events within the storyworld created by the narrator. 159 That is, which represent fictive events within the storyworld created by the narrator.

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of focalisation that can be found in Toussaint’s novels (and in those of other Minuit authors) has to be characterised by a relationship of “neither-nor” or of “both-and” (neither internally focalised nor externally [“zero”],160 both internally focalised and externally161), I argue that internal focalisation is the dominant mode that governs all narrative elements, including those that, at first glance, seem to display zero focalisation. In other words, according to my argument, there is no shift between internal and zero focalisation as between two equal modes in Toussaint’s novels, but zero focalisation is subordinated to the internally focalised mode. The narrator is the omniscient master of his own experiential, imaginary universe, which is embedded in the diegetic world in which he lives. His omniscience exists only on the ‘hypodiegetic’ level of imaginary events.162 I would like to substantiate this claim with a few examples. In Fuir, the episode recounting Marie’s phone call has the same structure as the episode of Delon’s phone call in La Télévision. Starting from auditory information transmitted via the phone (the narrator hears Marie’s steps; he hears her asking the guardians of the Louvre for the exit; he hears the phone banging against her thigh; he listens to her description of the painted ceiling), the narrator imaginarily enriches his mental representation of Marie’s walk through the Louvre (see F, 47–50). He makes this process of imagination even very explicit: J’écoutais Marie en silence, j’avais fermé les yeux, et j’entendais sa voix passer de mon oreille à mon cerveau, où je la sentais se propager et vivre dans mon esprit. (F, 50)163 Les yeux fermés [. . .], j’écoutais [. . .] la faible voix de Marie qui me transportait littéralement, comme peut le faire la pensée, le rêve ou la lecture, quand, dissociant le

160 “Weder die autobiographische noch die auktoriale Perspektivenkonstruktion folgt jeweils ihren eigenen Konventionen” (Brandstetter 2006, 202) (“Neither the autobiographic nor the auctorial perspective follow their respective conventions”, translation mine.) 161 “Ein Ich-Erzähler [. . .] ‘darf’ gerade nicht über die erzählerischen Privilegien verfügen, die einem auktorialen Erzähler [. . .] zugestanden werden. Eben dies geschieht nun aber in den Texten der jeunes auteurs de Minuit, in denen man es, auf eine kurze Formel gebracht, mit ‘allwissenden Ich-Erzählern’ zu tun hat” (Rajewski 2008, 339) (“A first-person narrator [. . .] ‘may’ not have the narratorial privileges that are conceded to an auctorial narrator [. . .]. But this is exactly what happens in the texts of the ‘young authors of Minuit’, where, as one might put it in a nutshell, one deals with ‘omniscient first-person narrators’”, translation mine). 162 I cannot preclude the possibility that, in one of his numerous novels, one or several passages may exist where this ‘hypodiegetic’ subordination of his omniscience is not made as explicit as in these examples. But I do not think that this would necessarily invalidate my argument, since this would mean to narrow one’s view to one or a few punctual examples. 163 “I was listening to Marie silently, I had closed my eyes and I could hear her voice going through my ear and into my head, where I felt it spreading and moving around in my mind” (RA, 43).

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corps de l’esprit, le corps reste statique et l’esprit voyage, se dilate et s’étend, et que, derrière nos yeux fermés, naissent des images et resurgissent des souvenirs, des sentiments et des états nerveux [. . .] (F, 51)164

Inasmuch as this technique of ‘imaginary’ or ‘hypodiegetic omniscience’ is hardly present in Toussaint’s early works, but becomes the dominant strategy in the last two novels, one could see in the increasing use of this narrative strategy a diachronic development in Toussaint’s poetology. In La Vérité sur Marie, all the stories that the narrator tells us about Jean-Christophe de G. are imaginary constructions, developed by the narrator on the basis of some minute details. His vision of the night that Marie passes with Jean-Christophe de G., for instance, is encapsulated for him in a singular detail of Marie’s apartment, namely in the bottle of grappa: Elle [Marie] avait immédiatement compris que cette bouteille de grappa était le détail tangible à partir duquel je pourrais imaginer ce qu’elle avait vécu, [. . .] tout ce qui s’était passé entre eux dans la chambre [. . .], j’étais désormais en mesure de combler le vide de ce qui s’était passé cette nuit dans l’intervalle, et de reconstituer, de reconstruire ou d’inventer, ce que Marie avait vécu en mon absence. (VM, 51–52, emphasis mine)165

These imaginary creations, however, are not only due to a penchant for inventing, nor are they, as the narrator sometimes suggests (see the last quotation), exclusively due to the need of filling his informational gaps (“combler le vide”, “intervalle”). His hypodiegetic imaginary omniscience also (and perhaps primarily) represents an instrument of power that allows him to exert authority over his rival who is introduced to the reader as Jean-Christophe de G.166 It is only after about seventy pages that the narrator informs the reader that, “[e]n réalité, JeanChristophe de G. s’appelait Jean-Baptiste de Ganay” (FA, 69).167 This is a point where it becomes obvious that the hypodiegetic imaginations of the narrator

164 “Eyes closed [. . .], I was listening [. . .] to Marie speaking faintly [. . .], literally transporting me, as thoughts, dreams, and books can do, when, releasing the mind from the body, the body remains still and the mind travels, swelling and expanding, while gradually, behind our closed eyes, images are born, and other memories, feelings, and states of being [. . .]” (RA, 43–44). 165 “She knew right away that, given this one tangible detail, this lone bottle of grappa, I could imagine her whole night, could see in detail what went on between them [. . .], I was now able to fill in the empty space between these two points of reference, and reconstruct, recreate or invent what Marie had lived in my absence” (TM, 41, emphasis mine). 166 Schneider equally draws on the power (“Verfügungsmacht”) that the narrator seizes by means of narrative acts – interpretative power over events in which he has not participated as well as power over Marie’s thoughts and feelings (see Schneider 2014, 31–36). 167 “Jean-Christophe de G.’s real name was Jean-Baptiste de Ganay” (TM, 55).

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intentionally skew the picture of the “real”, intradiegetic Jean-Baptiste, thereby wielding power over his rival: “Je me soupçonne même de m’être trompé volontairement sur ce point pour ne pas me priver du plaisir de déformer son nom”; “cette simple petite vexation posthume suffit à mon bonheur” (FA, 75).168 In a way, the narrator is thus unreliable169 since readers can never know which elements of his stories are truthful, in the sense of an equivalence (or at least partial overlap) between the hypodiegetic entities of his imaginations and the intradiegetic reality in which he lives. But since the narrator makes his unreliability explicit, he is, so to speak, reliable in his unreliability170: Parfois, à partir d’un simple détail que Marie m’avait confié [. . .], je me laissais aller à échafauder des développements complets, déformant à l’occasion les faits, les transformant ou les exagérant, voire les dramatisant. [. . .] J’étais sans doute capable de prêter foi à des rumeurs malveillantes et à amplifier les soupçons qui le [Jean-Christophe, ESW] concernaient. (VM, 73)171

The only regard in which the narrator claims to be unambiguously truthful and thus reliable is Marie, as the title already suggests. This “truth about Marie”, however, does not concern the (hypodiegetic, imaginary) events in which Marie is involved in the narrator’s imagination, but only her character, her dispositions, her way of behaving and of being in the world: Je me trompais peut-être parfois sur Jean-Christophe de G., mais jamais je ne me trompais sur Marie, je savais en toutes circonstances comment Marie se comportait, je savais com-

168 “I even suspect I’d done this intentionally so as not to deprive myself of the pleasure of getting his name wrong”; “this posthumous jab, however small, however simple, gave me great pleasure” (TM, 60). 169 As Shen summarises the notion, “unreliability is a feature of narrative discourse. If a narrator misreports, –interprets or –evaluates, or if she/he underreports, –interprets or –evaluates, this narrator is unreliable or untrustworthy” (Shen 2014, 896). See also Schmidt’s (2001, 110–113) notes on unreliability with regard to La Réticence as well as Walton’s (1990, 372–375) remarks on the relationship between the narratorial mediation of story events. 170 The simultaneity or superposition of reliability and unreliability in these novels deconstructs the inherent narratological opposition between these two terms. One might see in this simultaneity a sign of postmodernity, inasmuch as Linda Hutcheon claims a “double-coding of postmodern fiction” according to which the latter is characterised by an “inherent doubleness”, an “adherence to the logic of ‘both. . . and’” (Nicol 2009, 31). 171 “At times, spurred on by nothing more than a single detail Marie had shared with me [. . .], I’d allow myself to build the scaffolding of further developments, distorting the facts occasionally, transforming or exaggerating them, even romanticizing them. [. . .] I was capable of believing the defamatory rumors and of finding more reason to suspect illicit dealings” (TM, 58).

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ment Marie réagissait, je connaissais Marie d’instinct, j’avais d’elle une connaissance infuse, un savoir inné, l’intelligence absolue: je savais la vérité sur Marie. (VM, 74)172

It seems as if, for the narrator, this so-called “truth” merely concerns the construction of Marie as an intradiegetic character, and as if this truth could also be conveyed by imaginary events insofar as Marie’s behaviour showcases her temper, even in a fictive scenario. Consequently, the narrator can be considered, in Kendall Walton’s terminology, as a “storytelling narrator”. According to Walton, we are confronted with a ‘storytelling narrator’ whenever the act of narrating and the narrated events do not belong to the same storyworld. If [. . .] it is fictional that the narrator, in speaking or writing the words of a text, is spinning a yarn or telling a tale or authoring a novel, and fictional that he made up the events of which he speaks, his narrating and those events belong to different worlds. The world of the work contains only the telling; the events occur in a world within the work world. It is fictional in the work world that he creates a fiction in which it is (merely) fictional that those events transpire. (Walton 1990, 369, emphasis mine)

The narrator does not conceal the fact that he has made up the stories that he tells about his beloved Marie as well as about his rival Jean-Christophe de G. (and his rival’s horse). That he is a storyteller equally becomes obvious in textual parallels between Fuir (F, 51) and La Vérité sur Marie (VM, 164–165): in the two passages, the narrator describes his tendency of dissociating his mind and his body, of abandoning himself to dreams, hypotheses, memories and imaginations, mixing up true and invented facts, just as storytellers do.173 Schneider provides similar arguments, classifying the narrator as a “specific form of fictive authorship”, which has to be distinguished, on the one hand, from characters that are presented as authors, who really spend their time writing texts, and, on the other hand, from fictionalised versions of the real author (see Schneider 2014, 38). Instead, the narrator acts as the representative of the real author within the storyworld, empowering himself by means 172 “I may have been mistaken in many of my assumptions about Jean-Christophe de G., but never in those about Marie, I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted on every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie” (TM, 59). 173 In Fuir, he associates this dissociation of mind and body also with the act of reading: “la faible voix de Marie [. . .] me transportait littéralement, comme peut le faire la pensée, le rêve ou la lecture” (F, 51). He thereby cues the activation of the schema AUTHORSHIP, which may be projected onto him as someone who makes the readers of the novel experience exactly the same dissociation of mind and body.

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of his imagination (see Schneider 2014, 38). Schneider, however, does not relate this “specific form of authorship” to Walton’s concept of ‘storytelling narrators’, nor does she see the narrator’s storytelling as an explanation or solution to the problem of focalisation. She still considers the narrator to confront readers with “the paradoxical situation of an auctorial heterodiegetic first-person narrator” (2014, 36, translation mine) and presents the kind of authorship performed by the narrator as a metafictional strategy by which the paradoxical narrative situation is made plausible (see 39). From my point of view, however, the narrative situation is not “paradoxical” at all. I would also argue against Rajewski’s claim according to which perspectival inconsistencies in the work of Toussaint (and others) are not logically or mimetically explicable. The perspectival inconsistencies in Toussaint’s novels are mimetically and logically explicable as resulting from the internal focalisation of the narrator, more precisely, from his tendency to enrich and distort his experiences fictionally. This allows also to explain passages that, considered in isolation, could be interpreted as cases of “zero focalisation”. Consider the following example: Elle m’aperçut, moi, là, debout dans une allée. [. . .] Il ne faisait [. . .] aucun doute que c’était moi, elle avait reconnu ma silhouette, de profil dans une allée, une barquette de tako-yaki à la main, que j’étais en train de manger avec des baguettes au milieu de la travée, un peu à l’écart de la foule. [. . .] Que faisais-je là ? [. . .] la probabilité que je me rende aux courses ce jour-là [. . .] était infime [. . .] J’étais pourtant soudain confronté à l’improviste à la présence de Marie, je l’avais aperçue moi aussi, je voyais Marie à une vingtaine de mètres de moi [. . .]. (VM, 146–147)174

If we take into consideration that the narrator plays a crucial role in the life of Marie, and that he makes an effort of reconstructing Marie’s experiences via his stories, it does not come as a surprise that we find story elements where the narrator is described from the outside, through the (imaginary!) gaze of Marie. With Walton one could describe this passage as “the narrator’s view of the character’s view of events” (Walton 1990, 377), but on the hypodiegetic level of his imagination.175

174 “She spotted me, there, alone, standing in the large passageway. [. . .] She was [. . .] certain it was me, she’d recognized my demeanor, my profile as I stood with a basket of takoyaki, eating takoyaki with chopsticks, slightly removed from the rest of the crowd. [. . .] What was I doing there? [. . .] the probability of my going to the races in Tokyo on this one day was minimal [. . .]. And here I was suddenly and unexpectedly in her presence, and I had seen her too, I saw Marie from a good sixty feet away [. . .]” (TM, 114–115). 175 The question “Que faisais-je là?” (What did I do there?) and the first half of the next sentence (“la probabilité [. . .] était infime”) represent a threshold leading from the imaginary perspective of Marie to that of the narrator himself. This textual threshold is ambiguous in that it

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Marie’s perspective can be imagined by the narrator – but did the meeting between Marie and the narrator take place? Is it an intradiegetic event that is factual within the novelistic fiction? There is no evidence against it. However, here, as well as in other passages, the question of what has “really” happened on an intradiegetic level becomes pointless – on the one hand because of the narrator’s objective: that of attending “a new truth, one that would take its inspiration from life and then transcend it, without concern for verisimilitude or veracity, its only aim the quintessence of the real, [. . .] a truth close to invention, the twin of fabrication, the ideal truth” (TM, 131)176; on the other hand because, as soon as we decide to classify him as a “storytelling narrator”, in spite of the narrative elements that allow him also to be viewed as a “reporting narrator”,177 he has to be regarded as the source of the whole storyworld he creates. The narrator’s explanations underpin this view: [. . .] même si j’étais moi-même absent des scènes qui se déroulaient derrière mes yeux fermés, si je n’en étais pas partie prenante, [. . .] je me savais intimement présent, non seulement en tant que source unique de l’invocation en cours, mais au sein même de chacun des personnages, avec qui des liens intimes m’unissaient, des liens enfouis, privés, secrets, inavouables – car j’étais autant moi-même que chacun d’eux. (VM, 166–167)178

At this point of the narrator’s revelations, one sees that none of the facts, characters and events can be assuredly qualified as “intradiegetic” any more. It even becomes impossible to draw a line between “hypodiegetic” imaginations and “intradiegetic” entities, since intradiegetic entities are accessible only through the filter of the narrator’s perceptions, experiences and imagination. As Walton puts

may be interpreted both as a thought of the imaginary Marie (rendered as an indirect thought report) and as thoughts of the narrator himself (i.e. of the ‘narrating’ or the ‘narrated I’). 176 “[. . .] une vérité nouvelle, qui s’inspirerait de ce qui avait été la vie et la transcenderait, sans se soucier de vraisemblance ou de véracité, et ne viserait qu’à la quintessence du réel, [. . .] une vérité proche de l’invention, ou jumelle du mensonge, la vérité idéale” (VM, 166). 177 According to Walton, we are dealing with a “reporting narrator” when the act of narrating and the narrated events belong to the same fictional world. This is the case as “long as it is fictional that he is reporting happenings that actually occurred, whatever else is or is not fictional” (Walton 1990, 369). Insofar as the narrator tells us about things or persons that actually occur in the world he inhabits (such as Marie or their love relationship), he is also a “reporting narrator”. The narrator thus oscillates between the two narratorial functions of reporting and storytelling. 178 “[. . .] even if I was absent from the scenes unfolding behind my closed eyes, even if I wasn’t actively involved [. . .], I knew I was intimately present, not only as the sole source of each evocation, but at the heart of each and every character, to whom I was bound in ways unknown, with hidden and secret ties linking us together – for I was as much myself as each one of them” (TM, 131–132).

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it: “Not only do we access what is fictional about the events of the story through fictional truths about the narrator; it is fictional in our games that our access to the events is through him” (Walton 1990, 373). These insights into the specific nature of Toussaint’s narrator(s) can be related to findings in the research literature on Toussaint where the novels have repeatedly been described as displaying a phenomenological access to the world: Flügge speaks about “novels of perception” (see Flügge 1992, 74); Schmidt considers one important characteristic of the new Minuit authors to reside in their description of the world according to a phenomenological tradition (see Schmidt 2001, 21); and Vidal, in his analysis of Toussaint’s early novels, identifies a “phenomenological obsession” (Vidal 1996, 12) and a “phenomenological grasp on the world” (14). To conclude, Toussaint’s novels provide us with autodiegetic (often storytelling) narrators and not with heterodiegetic omniscient narrators. The storytelling narrators are the source of the narrated perceptions, reflections and imaginations, thus revealing an “internal”, phenomenological point of view. I do not see any narrative elements that do not comply with this schema of internal focalisation. While a detailed analysis thus does not provide, from my point, convincing evidence for an inconsistent, “resistant” focalisation, one has to acknowledge, however, that scholars do perceive Toussaint’s novels as resistant in this regard. Insofar as I conceive of narrative resistance as a dynamic that develops at the nexus of textual structure and the reception of readers, one has to concede a certain amount of narrative resistance on the level of focalisation, even though the textual composition ultimately allows, from my point of view, overcoming this resistance. A form of resistance that cannot be overcome concerns the ontological distinction between intradiegetic and embedded hypodiegetic events. It is worth noting that the narrator enriches, changes and even distorts his experience of intradiegetic reality by means of hypodiegetic imagination. He thus blurs the boundary between factual intradiegetic (“Jean-Baptiste de Ganay”) and counterfactual hypodiegetic (“Jean-Christophe de G.”) entities (persons, perceptions, events) – a boundary that is a crucial ingredient of narrative composition. This is why the present chapter is not entitled “On the level of focalisation”: the sort of resistance that the novels allow readers to experience does not concern, in the upshot, a constitutive mismatch between narrative elements and focalisation schemata (INTERNAL versus ZERO FOCALISATION), but between narrative elements and schemata of “narrative composition” (as one might tentatively entitle them), such as FACTUALITY versus FICTIONALITY and INTRADIEGETIC versus HYPODIEGETIC WORLD.

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6.4.3 The strategy of reappropriation How can one interpret this resistant, narrative dynamics on the level of narrative composition with regard to the literary-historical context in which Toussaint writes? A host of contradictory terms have been proposed by the research literature in order to give an interpretive label to the novels of the last decades, published primarily at Minuit. Here, I would like to restrain myself to develop one notion that has originally been dropped by Dominique Viart. As Viart examines the literary turning point of the 1980s, he proposes to characterise this new novelistic era via a “reappropriation of the literary by means of which the ‘modernity’ does not pretend any more to be a discourse on the future, but a critical consciousness of a cultural heritage” (Viart 2001, 317, emphasis mine, here and hereafter translation mine).179 He links this idea to Chaillou’s notion of the “extreme contemporary”, which Viart describes as a “concern of the present that does not presume any more to decide upon the aesthetics of tomorrow, [but] that invents itself in the moment, without a conception of what has to be nor a fortiori of what ‘will’ or ‘will not be’” (2001, 326).180 According to Viart, the literature of the extreme contemporary lacks a general aesthetic theory, but is, during this epoch of ideological crises, in search of answers as well as in search of itself. Viart holds that this search proceeds via a regained (critical, disenchanted, “dialogical”, see 333–334) “transitivity”,181 which is threefold in that it implies a “return” to (i) “the subject” (i.e. autobiographies, auto-fictions), (ii) to “narration” (récit) (i.e. a rediscovered delight in storytelling) and to (iii) “the real” (i.e. literary reference to the immediate social or to a historical real). Does Toussaint’s resistance in terms of narrative composition display such a transitivity? Perhaps, it does even more: it examines the interdependencies between these three forms of transitivity. The internal focalisation pushes a “subject” (here: the narrator) to the fore and shows the extent to which “the real” (here: intradiegetic reality) depends upon the subject’s perspective (here: internal focalisation) and its practices of storytelling (here: blurring of the boundary between intradiegetic and hypodiegetic reality). Toussaint’s novels are thus not

179 “[. . .] réappropriation du littéraire, par où la ‘modernité’ ne se donne plus comme discours d’avenir mais conscience critique d’un héritage culturel” (Viart 2001, 317, emphasis mine). 180 “L’extrême contemporain [. . .] est ce souci du présent, qui ne s’aventure plus à décider des esthétiques du demain, qui s’invente dans l’instant, sans conscience claire de ce qui doit être ni a fortiori de ce qui ‘sera’ ou ‘ne sera pas’” (Viart 2001, 326). 181 This is an important catchphrase for the whole discussion. See for example Viart and Vercier (2008, 16) and Asholt and Dambre (2010, 11).

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simply transitive, but they expose literary transitivity as a rhizomatic web of interdependencies between “the subject”, “the narration” and “the real”.182 Considered from this perspective, La Réticence, which is often considered as an exceptional novel, whose narrativity deviates in many respects from that of the other novels, is revealing in terms of Toussaint’s narrativity inasmuch as it carries this narrative strategy to extremes: the “crime” of the dead cat in the haven – the central object of the narrator’s preoccupations – is nothing but a misled, arbitrary mental construction of a (‘hypodiegetic’) story created out of fragments of intradiegetic reality. Of course, it would not be wrong to summarise La Réticence by saying that it tells the story of a paranoid man. But this statement would miss the central point of the story. One has to go one step further by asking: Why does Toussaint tell the story of a paranoid man? The central trait of paranoid personalities is the fact that they construct stories that are wrong to the extent to which they are not at all consistent with the (stories of the) reality of others. Remember that Bruner (1991) holds that people construct reality via narratives. Human beings appropriate reality by the telling of stories, but this is such an ordinary practice that it generally goes unnoticed. By telling the story of a man who tells an incredible (false, paranoiac) story, Toussaint lays bare the process of storytelling itself,183 namely the creation of connections between fragments of reality and the dependence of this creative work from individual dispositions and viewpoints, in a nutshell: the subjective nature of reality as a narrative construct, or, put differently, the narrative constitution of a necessarily subjective reality. La Réticence thus tells the story of a man who tries to appropriate reality – just like other Toussaint narrators. The narrator of the tetralogy, on his part, tries to appropriate reality through his more extended, narrative inventions (“Tu inventes, dis-je. Non, je n’invente rien, dit-elle. C’est toi qui invente, dit-elle”, FA, 59).184

182 The rhizomatic connection between subject, narration and reality can be correlated with the three irreducibilities explored in section 1.4: the subject correlates with irreducible perspectivity, reality with irreducible diversity, and narration with the irreducible need for order. In the two chapters, I argue for their rhizomatic interconnectedness and interdependence. If one agrees with my claim that Toussaint’s novels reflect (“meta-narratively”) upon this interdependence, one could say that they have a rhizomatic quality insofar as the rhizome tries to model the interactions and transitions between these three elements as well. 183 Lemesle presents a similar hypothesis: “Le délire paranoïaque serait ainsi une sorte de reflet pathologique du travail d’imagination et de composition du romancier” (Lemesle 1998, 111). 184 “You’re making this up, I said. No, I’m not making anything up, she said. You’re the one making things up, she said” (ML, 37). If the subject, the real and the narration are interdependent, narrative reappropriation of reality is necessary for the constitution of the subject. It is very revealing in this regard that Toussaint’s narrators – this has repeatedly been noted in the

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If one agrees with my argument that Toussaint’s novels lay bare the rhizomatic interdependence between the subject, the narration and the real, then one has to admit that Toussaint’s narrativity has a strong metanarrative impetus inasmuch as it foregrounds the process of narration, which is the creative source of the novels themselves.185 The difference between Toussaint and his narrators, however, is that they are confronted with different realities; Toussaint, as a novelist in the era after modernity and the Nouveau Roman, has to deal with the reality of literary-narrative conventions. If we assume that people appropriate reality via narrative means, we have to ask: How does Toussaint use narrative means in order to appropriate not only postmodern reality (in a social sense), but also the literary-narrative reality of the post-Nouveau-Roman era? Taking the broader discussion of the “new generation” of novelists into account, many answers have been proposed to this question (including those given by Toussaint himself). Some representative catchphrases dropped in order to characterise Toussaint’s literary solution are non-totalising, “fragmented realism” (Asholt 2013, 29; 1994, 22), realism with suspicion (Asholt and Dambre 2010, 16), “laboratory and archive of life knowledge” (Asholt and Dambre 2010, 16), inherent “hybridity” (Schoots 1997, 201), “inauthenticity” (Brandstetter 2006), “undercutting of aesthetic norms” (Mecke 2000, 419), “breach of style” (Mecke 2000, 417), “postliterary” (Mecke 2000, 429) or “disenchanted literature” (Viart 2001, 333), irony (Asholt 1994, 30; Schmidt 2003a, 26; Brandstetter 2006, 197–198; Volmer 2007) or diegetic and poetological playfulness (Flügge 1992; Asholt 1994, 30; Viart and Vercier 2008, 19). Picking up the idea of Viart, I propose to understand Toussaint’s appropriation of narrative and social reality as a form of a reappropriation by means of narrative resistance: there is a refusal to comply with reality as it has been appropriated, conventionalised and schematised beforehand. This insight sheds a new light on our earlier, schema-theoretical analyses. Every schema is a condensed, memorised appropriation of reality – it structures our access to the world ab ovo. In a way, schemata thus prevent us from genuine experiences to the extent to which reality is always mediated by the structures of our conceptual apparatus.186 If one takes the rhizomatic interdependencies between reality, subject and narration into account, one could even say that pre-established schemata not

research literature – often find themselves in front of mirrors and experience difficulties in discerning their faces in them. 185 See also Lemesle (1998, 111) and Rajewski (2008, 339–340). 186 This is one of the observations that are at the core of Shklovky’s (1990) idea that literariness lives by ostranenie.

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only prevent one from the possibility of appropriating the real (or reality), but also from the possibilities of narration187 and of subjectivity.188 Narrative resistance as a dynamic that struggles against schemata can thus be interpreted simultaneously as a struggle for the reappropriation of reality,189 of narration (especially if the resistance is directed against narrative schemata) and of (literary) subjectivity (or individuality). On the intradiegetic level, Toussaint’s protagonists try to reappropriate reality and their own identity by using schemata in inconsistent ways. One could add here the prevailing penchant of many of Toussaint’s narrators to nonconformist behaviour.190 His irony sometimes seems to be an expression of a general refusal to comply with schemata of social behaviour as well. For instance, after having been left by his fiancée, Monsieur continues residing in the apartment of his fiancée’s parents, Mr and Mrs Parrain. His irony allows him to prevail against their expectations (of which he is indeed very well aware): Depuis qu’ils avaient rompu, toutefois, sa fiancée et lui, les Parrains éprouvaient peutêtre quelques scrupules à continuer de le garder chez eux. [. . .] Monsieur, lui, continuait d’entretenir avec tout le monde les meilleures relations. Les Parrain, par exemple, [. . .] ne ménageaient aucun effort pour l’encourager à trouver un nouvel appartement. Le matin, lorsque après sa douche, il venait prendre le petit déjeuner avec eux en peignoir de bain, ils ne manquaient de s’inquiéter de l’état de ses recherches, et ce fut même Mme Parrain, vraiment très gentiment, qui, prenant un jour les choses en main, finit par lui trouver un trois-pièces dans le quartier. (M, 30–32)191

187 See Bruner’s (1991) emphasis of the breach component of narratives in the context of his reflections on the relationship between canonicity (i.e. schema conformity) and breach. 188 If one relates the idea of the subject to the idea of literary authorship, namely in the sense of a successful expression of ingenious literary subjectivity, literary refreshment (see section 3.2) or the norm of norm breaching (see Mecke 2000, 427–428) seem to be necessary for an author in order to assert him- or herself as a subject in the literary field. 189 The idea of a literary reappropriation of reality via narrative resistance may be related to Viart and Vercier’s qualification of this kind of literature as “disturbing” (“littérature déconcertante”), which is opposed to “consentient” (“littérature consentante”) and “concerted” literature (“littérature concertante”). See Viart and Vercier (2008, 12–14). They argue that it is impossible to create new meanings and to preserve simultaneously old forms (see 13). 190 A short, funny example can be found in La Salle de bain: “Je quittai l’hôtel et, dans la rue, demandai le chemin de la poste à un homme qui courait (j’ai toujours pris plaisir à demander des renseignements à des gens pressés)” (SB, 68, paragraph 25). 191 “Since they had split up, however, his fiancée and he, it was possible that the Parrains had a few qualms about having him stay on. [. . .] As for Monsieur, he continued to maintain the best relations with everyone. The Parrains, for example, [. . .] made every effort to encourage him to find a new place. In the morning, when he came in after his shower to have breakfast with them dressed in his bathrobe, they never failed to inquire into the progress of his

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Moreover, at the nexus of the levels of story and discourse, Toussaint’s novels reappropriate tellability (see section 6.3). Finally, narrative resistance can also be detected on the level of narrative composition. Here, narratological schemata or instruments (such as (UN-)RELIABILITY, INTRADIEGETIC versus HYPODIEGETIC level or FACTUALITY versus FICTIONALITY192) are activated, but narrative elements simultaneously refuse to comply with them (see section 6.4.2).193 Kauß (2008) maintains that Toussaint’s novels live by procrastination, on the levels of both narrative composition and narrative contents.194 My thesis of reappropriation contradicts to a certain extent this claim since there is a crucial difference between saying that meaning and identity are constantly deferred (by means of procrastination) or that they are re-appropriated (that is, re-created). However, the contradiction between these two hypotheses is perhaps only superficial. There are at least three important overlaps between Kauß’s and my own analysis. Firstly, Kauß claims that Toussaint’s procrastination represents a narrative strategy (level of narrative composition) that is process-oriented and not resultoriented (see Kauß 2008, 396). This claim overlaps with my conceptualisation of narrative resistance as a form of coherence in progress. Secondly, Kauß invokes in this context, under the heading of “dehierarchisation” (“Enthierarchisierung”, Kauß 2008, 401), Bertho’s observation that events cannot be ranked according to their teleological importance – an aspect that I have analysed as narrative resistance against tellability (see section 6.3). Thirdly, throughout her analysis of Toussaint’s novels, Kauß highlights aspects of dissimulation. She argues, for instance, that elements of narrative procrastination “dissimulate an emergent subjectivity” (“[. . .] mit [. . .] Elementen des narrativen Aufschubs eine neu entstehende Subjektivität zu dissimulieren”, 404), including the emergence of an individual narrative strategy and identity on the part of Toussaint.195 This idea is to a certain

search, and it was Madame Parrain even, who, really very nicely, took things in hand one day, and finally found him a three-room apartment in the neighbourhood” (ME, 27–28). 192 As Nicol notes, the blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction is typical for postmodern literature. “The metafictional staging of a clash between real and represented worlds encourages us to pursue the implications to their logical conclusion: fiction is fictional, but no more so than reality” (Nicol 2009, 39). 193 These forms of resistance, which create an oscillation or a “dialogue” between terms that are traditionally strictly separated, such as fact versus fiction, can be related to Viart’s idea of a “dialogical posture”. See Viart (2001, 334). 194 “Prokrastination als Medium und Objekt narrativer Gestaltung” (Kauß 2008, 379, orig. emphasis); “Ästhetik des aufschiebenden Erzählens” (385; see also 404). 195 An “interpretative ascent” comes into play here (see section 6.5). If procrastination, on a first level, defers the creation of identity, it can be interpreted, on a “higher” level, as a constitutive trait of identity – both of procrastinative characters (i.e., on the level of narrative contents)

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extent compatible with my claim that Toussaint’s novels work towards the reappropriation of the reality, narration and the subject. Narrative resistance and procrastination are thus not necessarily mutually exclusive strategies of narration, since there are substantial overlaps. Nonetheless, they place focus on different aspects, the analytical notion of narrative resistance being, due to its broader, schema-theoretical design, a more flexible analytic tool. Besides the relationship between narrative resistance and procrastination, there is another important question that arises in the light of my analysis. Is it adequate to see in Toussaint’s novels the frequently invoked “return to (or of) narration”? Rajewksi identifies unequivocally, in the context of her analysis of “diaphanic narration”, a “return to narration” and “to aesthetic illusion” (see Rajewski 2008, 336). To the extent that Toussaint’s novels do not, of course, display the same degree of autoreferentiality that characterises the Nouveau Roman (see Schoots 1997, 58, 201), but do refer to the world again,196 speaking about a “return of narration” seems to make sense. But inasmuch as the word “return” implies the idea of the reappearance of something known, i.e. the idea of a “formal folding in the literature of our time”,197 it has problematic implications. Asholt, for instance, identifies a number of characteristics of the minimalists (including Toussaint) that reveal a profound scepticism towards traditional narration rather than a “return” to it (see Asholt 1994, 19–20). Taking the various forms of narrative resistance into account, I therefore propose to see in his novelistic practice a strategy of “reappropriation” rather than a “return of” (or “to”) narration. This strategy of “reappropriation” not only concerns, on a formal level, an effort to find one’s own narrative (‘post-nouveau-roman’) expression, but also discloses – in compliance with a rhizomatic interconnectedness between the subject, the real and narration – two further efforts: to find an individual narrative access to “postmodern” reality and to integrate a “cultural heritage” (Viart 2001, 317) into oneself as a postmodern ‘subject’. As the list of catchphrases above, used to describe the literature of this “new aesthetic era”, indicates, it is sometimes difficult to separate analysis,

and of Toussaint as an author (i.e., procrastination as a strategy of narrative composition). According to Kauß, Toussaint uses strategies of procrastination (syntactical, lexical, rhetorical means and story contents, see Kauß 2008, 491) in order to mark himself off from earlier narrative practices, celebrating, as Kauß puts it, indeterminacy as an aesthetic and ludic factor (see 382). 196 “Il ne s’agit plus en effet d’‘écrire’ – au sens absolu du terme – mais bien d’écrire quelque chose, que ce quelque chose relève du réel, du sujet, de l’Histoire, de la mémoire, du lien social ou encore de la langue” (Viart 2004, 289). 197 “Il n’y a en effet aucun retour à la tradition, aucun repli formel, dans la littérature de notre temps” (Viart and Vercier 2008, 19).

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interpretation and evaluation. By developing the idea of a narrative strategy of “reappropriation”, I have tried to work with a term that does not already imply a judgment upon the quality of these novels. Simultaneously, insofar as “reappropriation” presupposes “appropriation”, I have already introduced a tiered, two-fold dimension into my analysis. This two-fold dimension mirrors, on the one hand, the nature of cyclic and circular semiotic processes (as discussed in section 1.4): there are acts of “translation” through which appropriations, i.e. old orders (“irreducible diversity”) are reappropriated, i.e. restructured (“irreducible need for order”) according to an “irreducible perspectivity”. On the other hand, a tiered dimension is typical for the discussion of the literariness of Toussaint and his peers, which I will analyse in the next section.

6.5 The slot of ‘literariness’: Strategies of reception As I have argued in chapter 3, narrativity is inextricably interconnected with coherence and literariness. Insofar as Toussaint’s novels challenge norms of coherence,198 it does not come as a surprise that their literary quality equally represents a subject of debate – in other words, that the novels resist fitting easily into the conceptual slot of LITERARINESS (in the sense of high literary-aesthetic quality). What equally does not come as a surprise, then, is the fact that the positions defended within this discussion rest upon arguments for or against the existence of one or another form of coherence in the novels, coherence serving generally as an argument for literariness, incoherence as an argument against it. This discussion becomes, however, quite complicated for two reasons. On the one hand, although researchers argue about the coherence “in” the novels, resultative coherence emerges out of the interactions between readers and texts, implying activities such as the drawing of inferences, gap-filling by means of world knowledge or blending. The forms of coherence claimed by readers are thus not exclusively located in the text, but in the “interpretative space” (see Caracciolo 2011, 180) between the text and themselves. Especially with regard to central characteristics of French literary minimalism such as reductionism, fragmentation or “undercodedness” (“Unterkodiertheit”, Eberlen 2002, 172), one has to note that the forms of resultative coherence constructed by researchers vary, within this interpretive space, in their distance or proximity to the textual versus readerly (or cognitive) pole. That is, while some forms

198 “Les auteurs minimalistes ne racontent aucunement une histoire linéaire et cohérente qui se présenterait toute faite au lecteur” (Schoots 1997, 114).

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of resultative coherence (and their respective literariness) are primarily inspired by and manifest themselves in the text, other constructions of coherence are not directly derived from the text, but due to the establishment of relationships between textual elements and other conceptual sources.199 I contend that there are two kinds of interpretative distance from the text. On a “horizontal” axis, distance from the textual pole is equivalent to proximity to the readerly pole; this happens, for instance, if one illegitimately projects one’s own interests or problems onto textual structures. But distance to the text can also be created on a “vertical axis”; this has to do with different degrees or levels of coherence and/or meaning. The corresponding movement upwards has been discussed by Spoerhase (2007, 425, 429) under the heading of “semiotic ascent” or “ascent of meaning” (see also section 6.5.2). Spoerhase draws on Jannidis (2004) who uses Grice’s principle of cooperation in order to formulate a “narrative principle of cooperation”. This principle claims that there is a kind of implicit, mutual expectation on the side of readers and of authors according to which narratives convey actions or behaviours of characters within a certain setting in an interesting and effective way (see Jannidis 2004, 55, 82). Jannidis adds, with a nod to modern literature, that violations of this principle (i.e. seemingly uninteresting or ineffective practices of storytelling) do not restrict the validity of the principle, but are rather essential for it inasmuch as such violations challenge the reader to search for an understanding of the text that allows the validity of the principle to be preserved (see Jannidis 2004, 55–56). Spoerhase criticises Jannidis’s application of Grice’s principle to literarynarrative communication, arguing that the “principle of charity”, implied in Jannidis’s narrative principle of cooperation, relies on a radical imbalance between the two major instances of literary communication, namely between the text and the reader. Spoerhase argues that, if it is exclusively up to the reader to interpret the communicative structure of the text as maximally effective and to provide the respective text with interest, coherence or meaning (regardless of how much the text itself deviates from these norms), then the “asymmetry of the hermeneutic relation is calibrated in favour of the author” (Spoerhase 2007, 419–420, here and hereafter translation mine). According to Spoerhase, Jannidis’s narrative principle of cooperation has the inconvenient consequence that one cannot distinguish any longer between good and bad literary texts, since any textual insufficiency would have to be attributed to the incompetence of the reader. This would lead to a

199 I have elaborated on this problem in my considerations on Kafka with regard to allegorical interpretations (see section 5.4.1).

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“hermeneutics of enhancement”, which obliges the reader to “repair” defective texts (see 424–425). What is important in this context is that, according to Spoerhase, such a repair would bring along a “semiotic ascent” (or “ascent of meaning”) (429, 425), i.e. the establishment of a second-degree coherence or meaning: the text itself deviates, on a first level, from norms such as coherence and meaningfulness and thereby fails to comply with schematic requirements or expectations (as those formulated by Jannidis’s principle of cooperation). As a reaction, the reader searches for second-degree coherence, i.e. for coherence that allows a reinterpretation to overcome or to ‘naturalise’ (in Culler’s terms) first-degree incoherence. I will call this act an interpretative ascent200 in order to underline the fact that it is through interpretation that one overcomes textual deviances.201 What is problematic about this semiotic or interpretative ascent, according to Spoerhase, is the distinction between legitimate and arbitrary reinterpretations of texts. Everything can be read allegorically and the “strategy of exemplification, according to which one reinterprets meaningless linguistic material as an exemplification of meaninglessness, is always eligible” (Spoerhase 2007, 424). Spoerhase thus asks how textual passages that require an allegorical reinterpretation can be distinguished from those that do not (see 427). Drawing on a proposition from Jannidis, Spoerhase discusses a solution according to which the textual deviance itself should justify, or, more precisely, trigger the interpretative ascent. He adds, however, that this solution obviously leads to a new problem, namely that of finding a criterion for the identification of such a textual trigger. It seems as if Spoerhase considers the “manifest absurdity” of textual elements as a good candidate for such a criterion, but he highlights the

200 One might, of course, criticise Spoerhase’s and my use of the term “ascent” as metaphorical. Unfortunately, I am not able to unroll, within the restricted frame of this work, my general position on metaphors in scientific discourse, but I would like to point at least to the fact that the idea of the creation of a (vertical) distance, as implied by the word “ascent”, complies very well not only with common parlance in literary criticism (see section 6.5.2), but also with the fact that one obviously recedes from the text as soon as one develops a “second-degree” coherence. If the text itself does not allow readers to read it as interesting, coherent or meaningful, then one has to refer to extratextual knowledge and additional evidence in order to reverse textual boredom, incoherence or absurdity. One thereby creates more distance between the text and the interpretative meaning ascribed to the text. 201 Taking my reflection on general semiotic processes into account (see section 1.5), one can, alternatively, describe each interpretative ascent as an act of “translation” through which elements that lack meaningful coherence (i.e. the “defective” text passages) are provided with a new order, structure or coherence (i.e. with an “enhanced” reading) according to an “irreducible perspectivity” (namely that of the interpreter who performs the interpretative ascent).

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fact that this criterion is not independent from the socio-historical context. Interpretative ascent, as a legitimate strategy, thus cannot be entirely theorised on an abstract level. Its legitimacy has to be examined in each case and depends on the extent to which interpreters provide claims of absurdity with a socio-historical foundation (if they work with this criterion). We will see that it is exactly this historical dimension that plays an important role in the interpretative ascents that scholars perform in their debate on Toussaint’s literariness. Building on this concept of interpretative ascent, I will firstly consider interpretations that aim to create a match between narrative elements and a norm of literariness. According to my analysis, such interpretations claim the existence of forms of coherence that the interpreters themselves establish, notably by conceptual blending. These blending processes strive to establish a correspondence between form and content, which, as a classical aesthetic criterion, serves the ascription of “literary” value. In these cases, examined in section 6.5.1., the ascription of literariness thus depends on evidence for (and, respectively, on the creation of) coherence. Secondly, in section 6.5.2, I will give a broader overview on the whole discussion, including positions that argue not for, but against Toussaint’s literariness. That there is a heated debate upon Toussaint’s literary quality shows the extent to which literariness, as a literary value, is subject to “negotiations” between input elements and schemata. As I will argue, the whole discussion can be structured as consisting of three interpretative layers or levels, which result from two ‘interpretative ascents’, performed on the basis of literary-historical knowledge. In the upshot, judgments of literariness vary in accordance with the interpretative levels on which researchers argue Toussaint to be best located.

6.5.1 Form-content blends Since the eighteenth century, “form” and “content” represent together an important conceptual pair in aesthetics and in the treatment of art and literature (see Schwinger 1972, 975). For Herder, Goethe and romanticism, the correspondence between form and content is an important aesthetic norm inasmuch as the idiosyncrasy of content finds its equivalence in an individual, organic form; also for Hegel, content and form cannot be separated from each other (see Schwinger 1972, 975). Although the current theoretical discourse on literariness does not give special emphasis to the equivalence of form and content, its (at least implicit) prevalence until today – not only within literary criticism, but also in literary theory – can scarcely be disputed (see Herbert 2004). This also becomes obvious if one takes a closer look at the research literature on Toussaint and the minimalists.

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The notion of minimalism, although it has been justifiably criticised, especially for its one-dimensionality, has the advantage of highlighting a particular aspect of the respective novels’ reception. Due to the various minimalisms that characterise the novels’ contents (reduction of eventfulness, of psychology, of progression, etc.), minimalist texts provide interpreters with a minimum of cues for an interpretative approach. Literary scholars are, in a way, confronted with the challenge of making something out of little – a maximum out of a minimum. By choosing the term minimalism, researchers thus have not only described an abstract structural feature of these novels, but have also referred implicitly to the main problem with which academic researchers find themselves confronted when working on this kind of literature. As a solution strategy, researchers focus sometimes on the formal properties – In the case of Toussaint, for instance, on the fragmented structure, the numeration and the arrangement of the three parts of La Salle de bain, or, more generally, on the relationship between the narrator and his storied alter ego, on matters of focalisation or on Toussaint’s gusto for parentheses and other insertions in nearly all of his novels. The analysis of formal properties alone, however, cannot overcome the minimalist challenge of interpretation either. Interpretation requires referring to the novels’ “meaning”, but their “meaning” cannot be deduced exclusively from their superficial contents, which are, according to their minimalist or reductionist nature, somehow resistant against meaningfulness. This is where blending, used as an interpretative tool, comes into play. Blending formal elements with content is a readerly strategy that is susceptible of providing researchers with the possibility not only of developing interpretations of these novels (despite their “superficial”202 meaninglessness), but also of providing the novels with literary value (according to the aesthetic criterion of form-content correspondence). Indeed, the research literature is full of such blends where either discursive structures or presumed poetological principles are projected onto novelistic contents (which, by themselves, are of little concern) or where extra-textual (socio-historical, literary, cultural) contents are projected onto novelistic forms and content. I would like to give a few examples, extracted from studies that mostly pursue a much broader argument. I will not always reconstruct the whole context of the argument, but concentrate, rather punctually, on the blends. I will not evaluate the respective blends as to their legitimacy or adequacy, but rather explain their

202 Mecke, for instance, holds that “the roman nouveau stays voluntarily on the surface” (2002, 109). Also Asholt (1994, 19) invokes the problem of what is manifest at the surface and what lies beneath it as he asks what is dissimulated by minimalist texts.

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construction in order to lay bare the interplay of coherence in progress (consisting in these examples of the blending process), narrativity (i.e. statements about narrative structures and Toussaint’s novelistic strategies) and literariness (i.e. explicit or implicit judgments upon the quality of the novels) – an interplay that I have claimed to be crucial for the understanding of narrativity (see chapter 3). Caldwell (1995) provides us with three examples of how presumed poetological principles are projected onto elements of the diegetic content. Caldwell notes that, in postclassical arts, one art sometimes uses the mode of expression of another art: As certain kinds of painting seek a temporal dimension, certain kinds of literature attempt to create a spatial dimension [. . .]. For this kind of literature, the problem is pictorial: how to constitute a space with a series of words. Narrative painting wants to seize time, while spatial literature tries to eliminate it. (Caldwell 1995, 375)203

Caldwell ascribes such a pictorial mode of writing to Toussaint’s novels in general and especially to La Salle de bain where the fragmented discourse interrupts the narrative time flow and creates “a series of fixed images, minutely detailed and often perfectly banal snapshots” (Caldwell 1995, 375–376). This reflection represents a blend inasmuch as a poetological principle (pictorial narrativity) is interpretatively projected onto the form of discourse (fragmented text structure). He then engages in a further, recursive blending process by projecting this blend again onto diegetic content, namely on “[p]hotographs in Toussaint’s novels”: “they are mises en abyme of Toussaint’s narrative practice” (Caldwell 1995, 375–376). As a result of this blending process, the simple diegetic element of photographs is interpreted as a metaphor for Toussaint’s poetology; this interpretation leads to (or targets?) the refinement and upvaluation of the minimalistic plot. Caldwell applies this strategy of blending two further times with regard to Monsieur: When a lady visits Monsieur in his room, he notices, under her “robe moulante”, “des traces à peine estompées des sous-vêtements vieux jeu” [. . .]. This detail represents another mise en abyme of Toussaint’s narrative practice: the lines of his narratives must often be detected across and beneath the text that in part hides them. (Caldwell 1995, 377)

In this example, Caldwell claims the existence of a poetological principle that could be called “subjacent narrativity”204 and projects it onto a diegetic element (Mme Pons-Romanov’s underwear). The result of this blending process is,

203 For a related narratological discussion, see Wolf (2003). 204 The idea of subjacency could indeed be related to my analysis of Toussaint’s rhizomatic narrativity, to the isotopic network that lies beneath the narrative surface (see section 6.2.2).

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just as in the photograph blend, a metaphorisation of diegetic contents: the underwear is read as a metaphor for Toussaint’s subjacent narrativity. This is obviously an interpretative ascent. We can ask (with Spoerhase’s argument in mind) whether this interpretative ascent is “triggered” by the respective diegetic element. I do not think so, since Mme Pons-Romanov’s underwear does not need to be reinterpreted; it is not manifestly absurd or inconsistent. Also photographs, by themselves, are by no means absurd.205 From the perspective of Spoerhase, this would be thus an illegitimate ‘interpretative ascent’. Caldwell provides us with a third example. Drawing on Toussaint’s poetology, he claims that “[t]he narrative regularly emerges not as figure, but as ground” (Caldwell 1995, 377), thereby highlighting the lack of eventfulness. He then projects this poetological principle onto a diegetic element, namely on the increasingly insignificant anecdotes. For Caldwell, the anecdotes that Monsieur and Anna tell each other are therefore “emblematic” of Toussaint’s narrative practice (see Caldwell 1995, 378). Caldwell thus provides the narrative element of Monsieur’s and Anna’s conversation, whose insignificance is emphasised on the level of narrative discourse by the narrator, with meaning in terms of poetological representativeness. Considering these examples, it is worth noting that Caldwell’s interpretations tend to conceal their blending strategies. As he speaks about the text’s “mises en abyme”, he suggests that it is the text that is metaphorical and reflects (metanarratively) on itself, while it is indeed Caldwell who projects extra-textual conceptions of Toussaint’s poetology onto specific narrative elements. Another example of a reception strategy that uses blending mechanisms and thereby attributes meta-narrative qualities to Toussaint can be found in Loignon’s (2006) article on Faire l’amour. According to Loignon’s analysis, the eponymous theme of Faire l’amour (i.e. the main diegetic content) correlates in four dimensions with Toussaint’s poetology. She thus proposes a blend between the concepts “faire l’amour” (to make love) and “faire un roman” (to make a novel). Cette histoire d’amour qui occupe l’espace romanesque questionne sans cesse ce qu’il en est de l’écriture romanesque elle-même. Ainsi, faire l’amour serait un peu comme faire un roman: se servir de gestes et de combinaisons déjà connus, déjà expérimentés, dont nous savons (un peu) le plaisir qu’ils vont nous procurer. Qu’en est-il lorsqu’on fait l’amour pour la dernière fois? Que serait la dernière tentation romanesque? (Loignon 2006, 25–26).206

205 Of course, the photos that the protagonist takes in L’Appareil-photo are much more deviant, but Caldwell does not draw on this specific example. 206 “This love story, which fills the novelistic space, incessantly raises questions about the novelistic scripture itself. In this regard, making love is a little bit akin to making a novel: one

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As far as I see, the “generic space” shared by the conceptual input spaces of the novelistic content (faire l’amour) and of the poetological principles (faire un roman) consists, in Loignon’s view, of four elements: i. a “tension between proximity and distance” (see Loignon 2006, 26, here and hereafter translation mine), which is argued to characterise both the relationship between Marie and the narrator and Toussaint’s relationship to the novelistic genre.207 ii. a “menace” of disfiguration linked to the intradiegetic acid and to a poetic temptation: “L’acide participe de la mise à distance du matériau romanesque [ . . . .]. L’auteur a voulu ‘acidifier’ son style, extraire au maximum le caractère humoristique. Chaque scène doit être lue sous la menace d’un acide qui la ronge, chaque tentation romanesque est placée sous le signe de sa défiguration” (Loignon 2006, 28)208; Loignon’s description of Toussaint’s style via the verb “to acidify” shows the extent to which story contents and Toussaint’s poetology become conceptually integrated in Loignon’s approach; iii. repetitions, which characterise as much the relationship of the protagonists (they make love repeatedly for the last time) as Toussaint’s style;209 iv. fragmentations, which concern as much the bodies of the protagonists (“Faire l’amour, [. . .] c’est morceler le corps aimé”, Loignon 2006, 31) as Toussaint’s écriture (“blocs textuels”, 30). The research literature has repeatedly blended novelistic fragmentation, as a current and deviant discursive strategy of Toussaint’s novels, with both diegetic and extratextual content. Motte, for instance, blends the “small, static forms” (i.e. the fragmented structure, the blancs) of La Salle de bain with the novel’s diegetic philosophy of immobility. As a result of this blending process, Motte attributes a general aesthetic-poetological principle of immobility attributed to Toussaint:

makes use of gestures and combinations that are already [well] known and that have already been tested; one knows (a little bit) the pleasures with which they provide us. What if one makes love for the last time? What would be the last novelistic temptation?” (Loignon 2006, 25–26, translation mine). 207 “Il s’agirait donc tout à la fois de ‘faire’ ou ‘défaire’ l’amour, comme de ‘faire’ ou ‘défaire’ le roman” (Loignon 2006, 27). 208 “The acid contributes to keeping the novelistic material at a distance [. . .]. The author wanted to ‘acidify’ his style, to extract the humoristic quality as much as possible. Each episode is threatened by the acid; every novelistic temptation faces the threat of defiguration” (Loignon 2006, 28, translation mine). 209 “[. . .] déconstruction de la continuité du roman [. . .] par un effet de répétition” (Loignon 2006, 30).

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“Like his narrator, and like other minimalists, Toussaint sees in those forms ‘fortifications against evanescence’ [. . .]. More broadly, that defensive role is the one that La Salle de bain accords to literature in general” (Motte 1995, 756). Asholt blends the fragmented structure of Toussaint’s novels with an extratextual content, namely with postmodern reality, more precisely, with the “contingent-incoherent universe”, which, today, is considered to be ungraspable in terms of totality: [. . .] insofern besitzen die [. . .] ‘Blancs’ neben einer textstrukturierenden auch eine inhaltliche Funktion. Sie spiegeln ein zufällig-inkohärentes Universum wider, das nur in Fragmente parzelliert darstellbar ist, und gewinnen damit auch Aussagekraft in bezug auf unsere Gegenwart. Jede Kontinuität, wie sie aus einer Gesamtsicht der Welt erwachsen könnte, ist obsolet geworden. (Asholt 1994, 22)210

Some researchers also blend three different levels. Volmer, for instance, claims that the subject-matter of “exhausting reality” (fatiguer la réalité), put forward by the narrator of L’Appareil-photo (i.e. on the extradiegetic level), reflects itself both on the level of story (i.e. on the intradiegetic level) and on the level of Toussaint’s poetology (see Volmer 2007, 217–218). Stump, on his part, who examines the ways in which Faire l’amour and Fuir invite readers to explore “unfinishedness”, blends diegetic video-pictures (qualified as “visual metaphors”, Stump 2006, 108) both with the diegetic relationship between the narrator and Marie and with Toussaint’s internovelistic poetology. The result of this blending process is a conceptual integration network according to which Toussaint’s novels coherently explore the interactions between “distinctness and oneness”: [. . .] at an art opening in Beijing, the narrator describes the videos being projected on the walls, ‘the images diluting each other . . ., separating and dissolving, then coming together and diverging again’ [ . . . .]: here, distinctness and oneness are continually asserting and annihilating themselves. In images such as these, I believe we might see a model of the ways in which these two novels fit together – and also, not coincidentally, a perfect expression of the narrator’s relationship with Marie. (Stump 2006, 108)

A recent example of an interpretative ascent can be found in Adler who interprets a comment by the protagonist of L’Appareil-photo on the bad circulation as a metafictional allusion to the “mauvaise circulation de la fiction” (2016, 107).

210 “[. . .] in this regard, the [. . .] ‘blanks’ serve not only the function of structuring the text, but also serve a content-related function. They mirror a contingent and incoherent universe, which can only be represented by dispersed fragments; they therefore become significant with regard to our present age. Every continuity, as it could result from an all-encompassing view on the world, has become obsolete” (Asholt 1994, 22, translation mine).

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These examples show that researchers use blending strategies in order to give coherence and meaning to Toussaint’s seemingly “meaningless”211 narratives. The blending strategies that have been applied mostly take the form of an interpretative ascent that leads to metaphorical readings of novelistic elements. These interpretations, which are based on conceptual integration, seem to be designed to make the case for Toussaint’s literariness; they aim to show that Toussaint’s novels satisfy a traditional criterion for aesthetic value, namely form-content correspondence, by blending elements of novelistic form with elements of (intra- or extra-textuel) content. These blends can be considered as dynamic readerly negotiations with the text, which attempt to make the text fit into the slot of literariness by means of conceptual integration.

6.5.2 The historical staircase of criticism: Interpretative ascents and descents In the previous section, I have already taken into consideration interpretative ascents, which were the result of blending strategies. In this section, I will analyse “vertical” movements of interpretation as well, but they have another quality inasmuch as they are bound up to literary-historical configurations. According to my analysis, the discussion of Toussaint’s (and other minimalists’) literariness as a whole can be structured into three general interpretative “stairs” resulting from two interpretative ascents. Interpretative negotiations of Toussaint’s literariness can mostly be shown to be ways of positioning oneself on one or several of these three stairs; this positioning usually implies interpretative ascents or descents. Since these vertical interpretative movements depend on the way in which critics refers to historical forms of literary narratives, the title of this subchapter bears the metaphorical title “the historical staircase of criticism”. I would like to begin with a general description of the three stairs and later demonstrate how researchers interpretatively position themselves and move within this staircase. The first, “basic” stair of the historical staircase of criticism can be characterised via key words such as “authenticity”, “innocence” and “literality”. This stair is literary-historically related to the traditional “realistic” paradigm of the nineteenth century inasmuch as the poetology that is associated with this stair aims at giving an authentic representation of reality (see Brandstetter 2006, 28–36). If

211 “Meaningless” only, of course, with regard to the superficial level of diegetic contents (representation of banalities) and with regard to the lack of a hierarchy of information that would allow to distinguish between what is important and meaningful and what is not (see section 6.2).

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I describe the corresponding mode of expression as “literal”, I do not mean to suggest that these narratives do not work with non-literal linguistic means (metaphors or irony), but that the literary discourse is considered to believe (“innocently”) in the possibility of authentic expression, that is, in the possibility of conveying a message or content “literally”, i.e. by its “own” linguistic means. What is also implied by realistic paradigms is, according to Asholt, an aspiration for totality, that is, the wish (and belief in one’s ability) to explain at least certain aspects of the “real” world in an all-encompassing manner (see Asholt 2013, 28). The second stair can be characterised via the terms “inauthenticity”, “suspicion” and “non-literality”. This stair is historically connected to the phase of literary-narrative innovations that spans from the avant-garde of the early twentieth century until the Nouveau Roman. Brandstetter has, of course, rightly emphasised that each of the phases of literary innovation that are included by this stair (such as Dadaism, surrealism, existentialism, Nouveau Roman) works towards its own kind of ‘authenticity’, at least if one considers authenticity to “resul[t] from the stylistic renewal that the corresponding literary current brings about in distinction from what was prevalent before” (Brandstetter 2006, 35, translation mine; see also Mecke 2002). Nonetheless, I prefer to use the label of inauthenticity, in combination with non-literality, since this stair is fundamentally opposed to the basic “realistic” dimensions noted above. Due to the so-called “crisis of representation”, the optimism regarding the possibility of authentic expression, of a “literal” description of reality and of a holistic access to “the real” has vanished. Literary language is “under suspicion” (see Sarraute 1974). Descriptions of this interpretative stair drop terms such as “irony” (see Eco 2002) or “satirical distanciation” (see Mougin 2012, 207). Irony or satire are understood in this context not as a local rhetoric figure, but as a general feature of the discourse, which, challenged by the modern norm of norm-breaking (see Mecke 2000, 427–428), expresses itself negatively by distancing itself from any solemn, original mode of expression. This stage is often described as representing a “second-degree” mode of expression, since an interpretative ascent takes place from the first to the second stair. A text from the second stair is susceptible of using the same narrative strategy or rhetoric figure as a firststair text, but, while on the first stair, this is interpreted as the “authentic” or “innocent” use of a specific narrative instrument, it is interpreted on the second stair as an ironic, satirical or otherwise distancing comment on the authentic first-stair use (as in the often-invoked example of Borges’s Pierre Ménard). Thus, if there is authenticity on the second stair, it has to be understood as an authentic distance from the first-stage authenticity and thus as a “second-degree” authenticity. An implicit positioning toward older literary forms is thus substantial for this stair.

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The third stair can be described via terms such as “exposed inauthenticity” (Brandstetter 2006) or “satire of distanciation”212 (Mougin 2012, 207). Whereas the irony of the second stair expresses an authentic distance to the first stair, third-stair literature is considered to have overcome second-stair irony, the latter being as much an “exhausted”213 possibility for third-stair literature as firstdegree authenticity for second-stair literature. The “satirical distanciation” of the second stair thus becomes itself the object of an estrangement, inverting itself into a “satire of distanciation” (see Mougin 2012, 207). If irony becomes the object of irony, the third stair may be said to display a “second-degree” irony. With Brandstetter (2006), one could describe this stair with the term “exposed inauthenticity” (“inszenierte Inauthentizität”), which is well suited to explain the difference between the second and third interpretative stair. While the “inauthentic” literature of the second stair creates meaning on an implicit (non-literal, ironical) level, literature of the third stair is considered to destroy the implicit meaning-making of the second stair by exposing (or exaggerating) the corresponding second-stair strategies of inauthenticity (irony, satire, allusions, etc.). For example, while a moderate, implicit irony, which could be detected through interpretation, is able to convey authentic meaning (second stair: second-degree authenticity), blatant irony can reach such a high degree of evidence that its authenticity and meaning wanes (third stair: second-degree inauthenticity). Remember that, according to Spoerhase, a semiotic ascent takes place whenever a linguistic utterance is not understood literally, but reinterpreted non-literally (because of the manifest absurdity of a literal reading). Considered from this angle, the third stair can be considered as the result of an interpretative ascent from the second stair, provided that irony (or any other form of “inauthenticity”) is not read any more as irony (and therefore “literally”), but is reinterpreted as a comment on the strategy of irony (because the blatancy of the irony makes its “literal” interpretation absurd). I read Eco’s conception of the postmodern as matching with this third stair. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past [. . .]. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. [. . .] in literature, [it will be] the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page [. . .] But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply

212 Mougin (2012, 207) makes a difference between “distanciation satirique” (“satirical distanciation”) and “satire de la distanciation” (“satire of distanciation”). 213 I am alluding to Barth (1984).

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to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. (Eco 2002, 111, emphasis mine)

It seems to me that, in this quotation, “metalanguage” refers to second-stair strategies of “inauthenticity” and “irony” means the second-degree irony of the third stair, which comes up with “exposed inauthenticity”. Inasmuch as Eco describes the postmodern via an insight into the limits of avant-garde innovations, silence being the outer limit of second-stair experimental strategies, his approach matches with Brandstetter’s conception of “exposed inauthenticity” according to which “the supersession of avant-garde surpassing strategies manifests itself in a selfreflexive game of inauthentic exposure: instead of matching with the norm of modern innovation, these authors flinch from the avant-garde paradigm by [engaging in] processes of ‘deliterarisation and dedifferentiation’” (Brandstetter 2006, 106, translation mine).214 There is a second overlap between Eco’s and Brandstetter’s conceptions. Eco holds that postmodernism essentially has to “revisit” the past and Brandstetter notes, correspondingly, that strategies of “exposed inauthenticity” imply the “recycling of modern and traditional material” (see 109).215 Toussaint’s (and other authors’) novels of this period cannot simply be ascribed to one of these three stairs since interpretations diverge as to the stair to which they ascend – or descend. In other words, researchers disagree as to the question of whether the respective texts display irony, second-degree irony or no irony at all. I would like to begin my review by summarising a position that is becoming more and more dominant. Interpreters who assume this position can be said to stand with one leg on the first stair and with the other on the second stair. This position is connected with Brandstetter’s idea of the “recycling of modern and traditional material” (see Brandstetter 2006, 109) insofar as novels of this kind use the various literary techniques that have been developed by traditionalism, modernism and avant-garde. Many researchers agree upon the crucial importance of these “quotations of form” for an understanding of the literature of today. Reggiani, 214 “Die [. . .] Ablösung der avantgardistischen Überbietungsstrategien manifestiert sich in einem selbstreflexiven Spiel der inauthentischen Inszenierung: Statt das Postulat moderner Innovation zu erfüllen, entziehen sich diese Autoren durch ‘Entliterarisierungs- und Entdifferenzierungsprozesse’ [. . .] dem avantgardistischen Paradigma” (Brandstetter 2006, 106). 215 I am emphasising these overlaps because, as I will explain in greater detail below, Brandstetter’s and Mecke’s positions have been sharply criticised by other researchers, especially by Rajewski, for the negativity of their vocabulary. I think, however, that one has to distinguish carefully between the systematic and the evaluative components of their approach; as the overlaps with Eco’s generally highly esteemed analysis of postmodernism show, Brandstetter identifies, on a systematic level, an important literary-historical paradigm.

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for instance, maintains that “a large part of contemporary French prose tends to constitute for its readers – against the radical economy of scripture, which has once been proposed by the novelist of the Nouveau Roman and the Tel Quel group – an encyclopaedia of the diversity of novelistic genre” (Reggiani 2011, 29, translation mine).216 Huglo (2003) speaks, accordingly, about an “archeology of the narrative in the narrative”217 (2003, 59). The question that imposes itself on researchers, however, is how this use of literary techniques, borrowed from the literary “dépôt culturel” (Viart and Vercier 2008, 20), has to be interpreted. This question aims, of course, at the issues of authenticity and realism. Is the use of “the novelist’s toolbox” (Stump 2006, 111) an “authentic” or an “inauthentic” strategy? Is it an originally new mode of expression or a “superficial”218 quote of old ones? Does it create meaning and “values” or does it replace depth of meaning by a light playfulness? Does it resignedly renounce any attempt of meaning making (see Brandstetter 2006, 193–200)? Or, if it creates meaning, is this meaning “innocent” in its own right or necessarily “ironical”? As Asholt puts it, the question is to know “whether this is a form of ‘return’ to an ‘ordinary’ or ‘traditional’ situation within the literary field, after an epoch of ‘devalorisation’ (of realism) and of autoreferentiality, whether this is a significant renewal within a continuous literary evolution or whether we assist to a veritable paradigm shift” (Asholt 2013, 32, translation mine). Asholt holds that traditional realism, as suggested by the first of the enumerated possibilities, has become obsolete (see Asholt 2013, 32). But, regardless of whether one considers the second or the third possibility as more adequate, the important point, in Asholt’s view, is that a “realistic” aspiration has to be stated; novelistic practices refer again to aspects of the real, the latter being the place of knowledge (about “life” and “survival”) that cannot be found anywhere else (see Asholt 2013, 32–33). According to this view, realism itself is the label of an open historical configuration that undergoes evolution.219 This evolution (“progrès”) has transformed the realism that

216 “[. . .] toute une part de la prose française contemporaine – contre l’économie radicale de l’écriture naguère proposée par les Nouveaux Romanciers et le groupe Tel Quel – tende à constituer pour ses lecteurs une encyclopédie des divers genres du roman” (Reggiani 2011, 29). 217 “Il n’y a pas un récit mais plusieurs modes narratifs qui reviennent en même temps. La coexistence anachronique de la légende, du conte, du roman historique, du roman de l’intériorité ou autres est peut-être l’une des caractéristiques du récit contemporain, instaurant une sorte d’archéologie de la fable dans la fable, faisant de raconter un verbe au second degré” (Huglo 2003, 59). 218 For an analysis of the notion of “superficiality” in the context of postmodernism, see Regn (1992). 219 “[. . .] on ne peut que constater les ‘progrès du réalisme’ comme ‘une tendance profonde et durable de la prose moderne’” (Asholt 2013, 32).

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aimed at a global representation of the real into a more moderate, partial realism of fragmented representation (“‘écritures du réel’ abordant le réel par touches, par fragments ou par instantanés”, Asholt 2013, 32; see also Asholt and Dambre 2010; Viart 2001, 328). This interpretation of current literary practices obviously stands, with its emphasis on realism, firmly on the first stair of realism and authenticity, but also on the second stair of inauthenticity insofar as the “distance” or “suspicion” that separates the second stair (e.g. the Nouveau Roman) from first-stair (traditional) realism has also become an essential characteristic of the new literary paradigm. While the notion of “return” (“of” or “to” the subject, the narrative, the real) well illustrates the extent to which the current literature is considered to imply the literary-historical aspects of the first stair, characteristics of the second stair are sometimes referred to under the label of “disenchantment”: La littérature traverse ainsi ce qu’on serait tenté de nommer une période de ‘désenchantement’ [. . .]. Désenchantés, ils [les romanciers, ESW] le paraissent effectivement dans le ton désabusé et légèrement ironique de leurs œuvres [. . .], mais bien plus encore dans la conception même de leurs romans, qui jouent de modèles romanesques sans jamais leur donner l’ampleur ni l’intensité qu’un lecteur accoutumé à ces modèles est en situation d’attendre. (Viart 2001, 329)220

One might rightly pose the question, however, whether these positions should not be considered as describing the “third stair” of the historical staircase. I would not agree with such a conceptualisation since what seems to be essential for the literature under consideration – according to the reported interpretations – is the fact that it cannot be pinned down, but is substantially located in the space between two stairs. In other words, it is a dynamic rather than a stair. This becomes obvious in the vocabulary used to describe this dynamic (“dialogue”, “oscillation”, “confrontation”, “combination”, see below). Consider, for example, Viart’s characterisation of this kind of literature via a “dialogical posture”, which develops “between” two entities, namely [. . .] entre l’héritage et la modernité, entre le sujet et l’autre, entre la réflexion et la fiction, entre l’histoire et l’imaginaire, entre le présent et le passé. Refusant de se saisir sur un mode catégoriel et théorique, elle dilue les genres, privilégie la rencontre et la

220 “The literature goes [. . .] through what one would be tempted to call a period of ‘disenchantment’ [. . .]. They [the novelists, ESW] seem indeed to be disenchanted if one considers the sober and slightly ironic tone of their works [. . .], but even more if one considers the very conception of the novels; they play with novelistic models, but give them neither the vastness nor the intensity that a reader, familiar with these models, would legitimately expect” (Viart 2001, 329, translation mine).

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confrontation. Sa position oscille entre interrogation et témoignage, inquiétude et recherche, exigence et plaisir. (Viart 2001, 334, emphasis mine)221

I think that it is the inherent movement between the first and the second stair that explains Keidel’s statement according to which Toussaint’s La Salle de bain “oscillates between creation and annihilation of meaning” (Keidel 2009, 108, translation mine) as well as Schoots’s remark according to which “the minimalist novels lend themselves to conflicting interpretations” (Schoots 1997, 201, translation mine). Schoots makes the literature’s intermediate position between the first and second stair the most explicit by characterising minimalist literature by an “inherent duality” (Schoots 1997, 201) and “hybridity”: Les œuvres minimalistes [. . .] ne sont ni tout à fait subversives, ni tout à fait affirmative. En effet, si elles s’opposent au consentement général, elles ne sont pourtant pas avantgardistes et si elles redécouvrent la représentation de la réalité, celle-ci n’est pas inspirée par cet éclecticisme qui caractérise une certaine littérature postmoderne. C’est cette hybridité qui explique – au moins en partie – les controverses au sujet du roman minimaliste [. . .]. (Schoots 1997, 201)222

There are, however, two problems in describing this literature as “hybrid”. Firstly, this description transforms an interpretative problem (i.e. a dynamic at the text-cognition interface) into a textual feature. Is it really a textual hybridity that engenders interpretative conflicts or do interpretative conflicts cue Schoots to postulate textual hybridity as their cause? What is, secondly, problematic about the idea of hybridity is its implicitly reconciliatory impetus. If Schoots maintains that “this hybridity [. . .] explains the controversies over the minimalist subject”, she implicitly suggests that the two positions are partly right and that there would be no conflict if researchers took the “duality”, which “inheres” in the text, into account. Such a reconciliatory conception, however, risks concealing the interpretative ascents and descents that are at the core of

221 “[. . .] between heritage and modernity, between the subject and the other, between meditation and fiction, between the story and the imaginary, between present and past. [This literature] refuses to commit itself to a [particular] categorical and theoretical mode, stretching the genres and privileging the meeting and the confrontation; its position oscillates between interrogation and testimony, worry and quest, demands and pleasure” (Viart 2001, 334, translation and emphasis mine). 222 “The minimalist works [. . .] are neither entirely subversive nor entirely affirmative. If they are in opposition to the public opinion, they are, however, not avant-garde; and if they rediscover the representation of reality, this representation is not inspired by the eclecticism that is typical for a certain postmodern literature. It is this hybridity that explains (at least partly) the controversies that are bound to the subject of the minimalist novel” (Schoots 1997, 201, translation mine).

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the respective conflicts of interpretation, and which are highly characteristic of the interpretation of these narratives. These conflicts, however, do not always erupt; they can sometimes be detected only on an implicit level. Consider, for instance, the oppositions between Stump’s and Rajewski’s analyses. In his study on the first two volumes of Toussaint’s tetralogy, Stump generally assumes the same intermediate position as Asholt, Dambre, Viart or Schoots,223 but favours the first interpretative stair by decisively denying the presence of distance and irony both on the level of content and of form. Concerning the narrative content, he holds that the two novels tell “an entirely credible love story, and they tell that story, I think, with perfect sincerity, without distance or irony” (Stump 2006, 111). With regard to the form, Stump claims that the novels’ [. . .] techniques [. . .] are deployed without irony, as is the Balzacien or Hollywoodesque phenomenon of the prequel. To my mind, these novels are not really a playful manipulation or quotation of those notions or techniques, but simply a use of them, however loose and indirect. Reading these novels, in other words, I find nothing that suggests I am in the presence of a parody or a pastiche; rather, it seems to me that Toussaint has simply taken up a number of tools [. . .] and that he has chosen to put them to use, little caring where they came from, less interested in showing us that he is using them than in what they allow him to do. (Stump 2006, 111, orig. emphasis)

Especially Stump’s last remark sharply contrasts with Rajewski’s analysis of the “diaphanic” nature of this kind of literature. While Stump maintains that Toussaint is not “interested in showing us that he is using” narrative tools somehow linked to tradition, Rajewski maintains that not only “the infringement of traditional, conventional narrative norms is being downright exposed and brought to the reader’s consciousness” (Rajewski 2008, 336, translation mine), but also “the conventionality and constructedness” of the narrative norms themselves (see 339). In brief, the two agree upon the first-stair realism of the novels,224 but they disagree as to the question whether one should, additionally, perform an interpretative ascent from the first to the second stair.

223 “This, then, might be the nature of the newness of Toussaint’s most recent novels: without allowing himself to be trapped in a definable postmodernism or traditionalism, he has created a writing that is unabashedly marked by both, and that recombines them in a manner suggestive of many possibilities to come” (Stump 2006, 111, emphasis mine). 224 Rajewski emphasises the “return to narration” and “to aesthetic illusion”, performed by these narratives (see Rajewski 2008, 336), and Stump describes Faire l’amour and Fuir as “beautiful, complicated love stories, genuinely moving and convincing in their mapping out of the tortured terrain of human affection and disaffection” (Stump 2006, 110).

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Rajewski argues for such an ascent – the term “meta-narration” (343) makes this also terminologically evident –, Stump against it.225 A similar disagreement concerning the interpretative ascent from the first to the second stair appears in the volume Romanciers minimalistes in the form of two diametrically opposed literary criticisms of Toussaint’s Faire l’amour. Interestingly, the authors – Philippe Claudel and Bruno Blanckeman – make a number of similar observations, emphasising the same characteristics, but their interpretation and evaluation of these characteristics is different. While Claudel decides for staying on the first interpretative stair, Blanckeman chooses the interpretative ascent. Claudel’s criticism touches primarily upon four (partly interrelated) aspects of the novel: (i) its clichés and pathos, (ii) its repetitions, (iii) its superficiality and (iv) its lack of authenticity, meaning and literariness. The first reproach concerns (on the story level) the clichéd, pathetic nature of metaphors (the earthquake as a metaphor for the separation)226 as well as, on the level of discourse, the narrator’s exposure of them (“l’insistance de l’auteur à pointer du doigt ces symboles”, Claudel 2012, 138). Claudel finds it “ponderous” (“un peu lourdement”, 129) that the narrator comments on the fact that Marie and his alter ego take two separate taxis, notably by calling it an “emblematic image of our arrival in Japan” (ML, 43). According to Claudel, not only punctual metaphors are used up, but also the elements of literary or narrative composition. Retarding the use of the acid until the very end is too much a common narrative means, hardly susceptible of creating suspense,227 the film-noir equipment is clichéd (see 136) and also Marie’s shaking, which mirrors the earthquake, is “a very clumsy literary effect” (“un effet littéraire très appuyé”, 136). The superabundance of repetitions concerning Marie’s slip, the protagonist’s exhaustion due to the time lag, the quake or the adjective “mouillé” [“wet”] contribute to this impression (see 132–136). In Claudel’s eyes, the effect of all this is not only a superficiality (“miroir superficiel des reflets de surface”, 137), which destroys the thematic potential (“Le fer de l’amour réduit à une limaille”, 130), but also a lack of authenticity, which deprives the novel of its literariness:

225 However, as I have explained above, Stump punctually tends to metaphorise narrative elements, thereby ascribing a meta-narrative quality to the text. 226 “Lorsque les corps et les cœurs tremblent, la terre ne doit pas pour autant trembler, sauf si l’on est au Japon peut-être, sauf si l’on est dans un roman de Toussaint. L’énormité de la métaphore n’a semble-t-il pas effrayé le romancier ni ne la fait renoncer à l’utiliser” (Claudel 2012, 129). 227 Claudel restricts himself to an ironical comment: “what a suspense!” (Claudel 2012, 134, translation mine).

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Faire l’amour est l’archétype du roman moderne, sans danger, éminemment light, vite lu, et qui donne l’illusion d’une langue, d’une poésie, d’une intelligence, d’un message, d’une portée pseudo-philosophique, qui donne l’illusion à ceux qui lisent peu, de lire. [. . .] Faire l’amour [. . .] est effectivement le roman d’une époque, qui se contente de flirter avec les conflits et les déporte [. . .]. C’est l’illustration d’une littérature qui joue à faire peur, qui joue à faire intelligent, qui joue à faire l’amour, qui joue à nous faire croire qu’elle est littérature (Claudel 2012, 138–139). [. . .].228

Claudel’s criticism can be considered, with regard to our staircase model, as a negative first-stair evaluation. Of course, that does not mean that Claudel misunderstands Toussaint’s work as a realist novel; the fact that Claudel interprets many narrative elements of Faire l’amour as literary clichés means that, in his view, Toussaint returns to quite traditional forms of expression, which, at their time, were realistic and authentic, but that, nowadays, have become obsolete and lack exactly the distance and irony that characterises second-stair literature.229 Claudel’s analysis thus perfectly illustrates a position that deliberately refuses to perform an interpretative ascent and to “enhance” or “repair”, as Spoerhase puts it (see above), textual passages that seem to be defective. Claudel thus decides to stay on the first interpretative stair. This also becomes obvious in Claudel’s reflections upon the last sentences of the first part of Faire l’amour (see FA, 91): Je pourrais bien sûr lui trouver mille significations, parler d’anus solaire, de trivialité sismique, de trou noir cosmique où tout s’abîme, de clin d’œil moqueur à une esthétique trash [. . .]. Ce serait assez simple en somme. On peut tout dire et tout faire dire. Le problème, c’est que ce doigt [que le narrateur “enfonçai[t] [. . .] dans le trou du cul [de Marie]”, see FA, 91], si je puis dire, m’a mis la puce à l’oreille et m’a fait embrayer sur une autre lecture. Il a pointé l’envers du livre, sa petite fabrique, ses artifices et sa couture.230 (Claudel 2012, 137)

228 “Making love is the archetype of the modern novel: extremely light, fast read, and simulating a language, a poetry, an intelligence, a message, a pseudo-philosophical significance. In those who do not read much, this creates an illusion of reading. [. . .] Making love [. . .] is effectively the novel of an epoch that contents itself with flirting with the conflicts, and that postpones them [. . .]. It is the illustration of a literature [. . .] that amuses itself with intelligent manners, that amuses itself with making love, that amuses itself with making us believe that it is literature [. . .]” (Claudel 2012, 138–139, translation mine). 229 “On est tenté de croire par moment que les propos oiseux du narrateur sont un trait d’humour de l’auteur mais l’idée est vite abandonnée tant on sent la jouissance [. . .] de l’auteur pour sa propre histoire, le peu de décalage qu’il opère vis-à-vis de ses personnages, du grotesque de ses personnages – disparue cette ironie constante des premiers romans [. . .]” (Claudel 2012, 138). 230 “I could of course find a thousand meanings for it, speak about [. . .] cosmic black whole[s] where everything disappears, about a mocking hint at an aesthetics of trash [. . .]. That would be quite simple, all in all. One can say everything [. . .]. The problem is that this finger [which the narrator ‘plunged [. . .] into her asshole’, ML, 57], if I may say this, has nudged my suspicion and

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The inauthenticity with which Claudel reproaches the novel is not a secondstair inauthenticity (and therefore a second-degree authenticity), but rather a failed first-stair authenticity. Blanckeman, on the contrary, performs the interpretative ascent that Claudel rejects as an interpretatively legitimate step. What for Claudel were literaryhistorically inadequate clichés and pathos, is reinterpreted by Blanckeman as comments on these pathetic clichés. Correspondingly, he ascribes an inverted effect to them: “Le pathétique, parce qu’il en fait trop, discrédite l’émotion qu’il est censé provoquer. [. . .] La femme pleure tout le temps [. . .]: autant dire qu’elle ne pleure jamais à sens unique. Le récit s’entretient de cette équivoque pour sécher le pathos [. . .]” (Blanckeman 2012, 144).231 The same structure of argumentation also applies to the subject of the novel. What, for Claudel, is nothing but a superficial, “light” repetition of outdated treatments of the subject-matter (love), which deprives the novel of any literary value, is reinterpreted by Blanckeman as an intentional strategy, which creates a renewal of the narrative genre (see Blanckeman 2012, 145). This is what, from his point of view, provides the novel with value: “En mettant à plat un thème convenu, Jean-Philippe Toussaint entend le requalifier [. . .]” (142).232 Whereas Claudel refuses to reinterpret textual passages as winking allusions to the aesthetics of trash (see Claudel 2012, 137), Blanckeman votes exactly for such an analysis (see Blanckeman 2012, 147). If one takes this interpretative ascent into account, it does not come as a surprise that Blanckeman describes Faire l’amour with the key words of the second stair of the staircase of criticism – irony, distance and suspicion.233 Finally, Blanckeman makes this interpretative ascent quite explicit as he invokes the familiar oscillation thesis according to which literary works are substantially located in the space between the first and the second stair: “Ce roman déçoit [. . .] un certain nombre d’attentes contraires qu’il suscite: trop peu ‘pre-

has set me on the track of another reading. It has laid bare the downside of the book, its little fabric, its artifices and its seams” (Claudel 2012, 137 translation mine). 231 “The dramatic – because he makes excessive use of it – discredits the emotion that it should evoke. [. . .] The woman cries the whole time [. . .]: which amounts to saying that she never cries in the real sense. The story upholds this ambiguity in order to make the pathos dry out” (Blanckeman 2012, 144, translation mine). 232 “It is by flattening a conventional subject that Jean-Philippe Toussaint succeeds in providing it with new value” (Blanckeman 2012, 142, translation mine). 233 “Dans la grande tradition de la littérature du soupçon, un jeu de distanciation ironique accompagne le discours amoureux, pour maintenir éveillée la conscience de ses clichés et éviter qu’il ne bouffisse en soufflé sentimental ou ne confisse en sirop glamour” (Blanckeman 2012, 145).

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mier degré’ pour marcher au lyrisme sentimental, trop peu ‘second degré’ pour figer en ironie textuelle”234 (146). Such first- and second stair interpretations of the novels have to be well distinguished from third-stair interpretations. One of the most explicit third-stair interpretations has been proposed by Pascal Mougin with regard to La Télévision. Mougin holds that the comical dimension of La Télévision reflects second-degree irony. He considers comicality to be the outcome of the satirical attitude of the narrator towards the (second-stair) distanciation that characterises earlier novels, such as L’Appareil-photo. [. . .] si le rendement comique est assuré, le procédé pourra paraître assez facile, sans audace subversive et sans portée politique d’envergure puisque la satire ne porte que sur des réalités faciles à ridiculiser [. . .]. Mais il faut bien voir que le raidissement moqueur du narrateur à l’égard du trivial quotidien fait lui-même l’objet d’une disqualification satirique. Cette disqualification du dédain facile à l’égard du monde moderne, cette satire de la satire, ce deuxième degré de l’ironie, [. . .] c’est tout le ressort de La Télévision. [. . .] La Télévision est une démystification de la posture du sage qu’avait formulée L’Appareil-photo. (Mougin 2012, 214–215)235

Mougin associates second-degree irony with literary value. This becomes obvious in his analysis of the “second-degree satire” (Mougin 2012, 215) of Monsieur: [. . .] si ces pages sont particulièrement réussies et présentent, à mon sens, une véritable dimension politique, c’est que le caractère débonnaire de la satire y semble fonctionner de manière ironique: à travers cette peinture un peu trop mollement plaisante, Toussainte ne pointe-t-il pas une forme d’anesthésie contemporaine face aux enjeux sociaux [. . .]? (Mougin 2012, 215)236

234 “This novel deceives [. . .] a number of contrary expectations, which it [simultaneously] creates: it has neither enough ‘first-degree’ qualities to lend itself to [a reading in terms of] sentimental lyrics nor enough ‘second-degree’ qualities to be nothing but textual irony” (Blanckeman 2012, 146, translation mine). 235 “If the comical rendering is guaranteed, the means [by which it is achieved] could be perceived as fairly simple, as lacking subversive audacity and a political scale since the satire touches only upon realities that lend themselves easily to ridiculisation [. . .]. But it has to be noted that the sustained mockery of the narrator regarding the triviality of everyday life is itself the object of satirical disqualification. This disqualification of a contempt with which the modern world could easily be treated, this satire of the satire, this second degree of irony [. . .], this is exactly what drives La Télévision. La Télévision is a demystification of the posture of wisdom that L’Appareil-photo has put forward” (Mougin 2012, 214–215 translation mine). 236 “[. . .] if these pages are particularly well written and present truly, from my point of view, a political dimension, it is because the good nature of the satire seems to function here ironically: Doesn’t Toussaint point to a contemporary form of anaesthesia regarding social matters by painting pictures that are too softly pleasant?” (Mougin 2012, 215, translation mine).

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Brandstetter performs, in her analysis of Toussaint’s novels, an interpretative ascent onto the third stair as well, but there is a crucial difference between her and Mougin’s approach. While Mougin considers the third-stair strategy of irony as fulfilling a specific (namely a political) function, which contributes to the literariness of the novels (literary value through socio-cultural criticism), Brandstetter’s third-stair interpretation hints at a dysfunctionality that governs a host of different strategies of narrative composition (not including irony). She analyses, in particular, the strategies of “perspectival construction” (internal and zero focalisation are “exposed as defective, as implausible constructions” through their inconsistent use, see Brandstetter 2006, 202), of “microstructural destabilisation” (narrative incoherences, inconsistent metaphors and comparisons and extremely hypotactic syntax, see 202–204), of the thwarted pastiches of former ways of writing (see 205–206), of exposed intertextuality (see 207–210) and of simulated realism (see 210–227). All these strategies make use of second-stair techniques (e.g., modern forms of focalisation or sustained intertextuality), but insofar as these strategies are deliberately dysfunctional and deliberately exposed as such, Brandstetter interprets them as commenting on themselves; this is how they create a distance to their original (second-stair) use. In other words, the inauthenticity of the second stair, which results from a distance to the traditional realistic paradigm, is raised one level higher through its exposure (“exposed inauthenticity”). With Brandstetter’s analysis, however, we reach the upper limit of both literariness (both in the classificatory and evaluative sense) and our historical staircase in two regards. Firstly, if the novels only repeat, mingle and expose older, pre-established literary techniques without creating new, original forms of expression, then a crucial modern criterion of literariness – formal innovation – is not satisfied. “Inauthenticity”, in this regard, contrasts with (first- and seconddegree) “authenticity”, understood as originality, newness or norm-breaking on the level of literary forms (see Brandstetter 2006, 106). Secondly, literariness is threatened by an alleged dysfunctionality. If the novels under consideration “expose” literary techniques (instead of “using” them in the sense of “giving form to a content”), then they are a kind of ‘meta-literature’ (literature “on” literature). The ascent onto such a meta-level implies that there is a certain distance towards the “literary” level from which one ascends. Is literature on literature still literature? Obviously, this brings up the question of “transitivity” and realism (self-reflexivity versus reference to “the real”). According to Brandstetter, the contemporary novels under consideration, including Toussaint’s prose, leave the realistic paradigm, which covers first- and second-degree authenticity (i.e., the first and second stair),

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behind. This sharply contrasts with Asholt’s position according to which contemporary narrative literature does not leave (but rather transforms) the realistic paradigm (see Asholt 2013). However, Brandstetter herself is quite cautious in her assessment and does not explicitly deny this literature its literary status. There is only one sentence (already quoted above) where she approaches such a denial, but even here, the important wording does not stem from her (but from Mecke) and the syntactical construction sets another focus: “instead of matching with the norm of modern innovation, these authors flinch from the avant-garde paradigm by [engaging in] processes of ‘deliterarisation and dedifferentiation’” (106, here and hereafter translation mine). Jochen Mecke, however, from whom the quote originates, and who seems to have largely inspired Brandstetter’s study, does not conceal his conviction that this literature lacks literary value, claiming, besides a “deliterarisation” (Mecke 2000, 420), the “destruction of literature as a value” (419), a “postliterary aesthetics” (435), a “postliterary reconfiguration” and a (second-degree) “demolition of literature” (see Mecke 2010). Mecke’s understanding of “demolition” refers to the idea of literary innovation, which necessarily lives by an attack on preestablished norms. Considered from this angle, “demolition” is an essential part of literature, which, by definition, develops and renews, demolishes and rebuilds itself. Literature thus substantially implies, in a way, two stairs: a first (normative) and second (norm-breaking) stair (“pratique à la fois littéraire et métalittéraire”, Mecke 2010, 40). The demolition performed by recent novels (the “roman nouveau”), by contrast, has another (third-stair) quality in that it does not attack, as second-stair literature does, concrete forms of écriture or specific aesthetic values in order to renew them. Instead, the “roman nouveau” attacks the definition of literature itself, including second-stair practices of demolition (i.e. the norm of innovation). Mecke holds that (third-stair) “practices of demolition” include the demolition of the author, of fictionality and of literary form. According to Mecke, the demolition of literary form is replaced by an “aesthetics of incoherence”, which amounts to a deterioriation of literature: [. . .] Echenoz et bien d’autres [. . .] pratiquent une esthétique de l’incohérence qui est ellemême en rupture avec la mise en valeur de la forme littéraire. Si elle constitue encore une désautomatisation, l’attitude qu’elle révèle est néanmoins bien différente de celle adoptée par l’esthétique moderne: là où cette dernière détruit la langue conventionnelle pour y puiser de nouvelles ressources poétiques tout en adoptant une position de supériorité, ces auteurs restent volontiers ‘en dessous’, marquant de cette manière non

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seulement leurs distances par rapport à l’esthétique moderne, mais également par rapport à ce qui est un élément constitutif de ‘la littérature’. (Mecke 2010, 49)237

In other words, for Mecke, the third interpretative stair is directly linked to a (so to speak: “negative”) stair, which is located beneath the lower threshold of literariness. It seems as if, for Mecke, reaching the third stair means descending down the whole staircase into the basement; the third stair is nothing but a chute through which one skids down onto a negative level of literariness. Correspondingly, Mecke speaks about “the minus two degrees of literature” (see Mecke 2000) or “degrees below zero of écriture” (2000, 422, translation mine). In this context, it is indispensable to reconsider Rajewski’s position, since she exposes herself as a critic of Mecke’s and Brandstetter’s arguments. In my view, however, her criticism partly fails its target. In the beginning, she criticises the negative judgmental vocabulary of Mecke and especially of Brandstetter. What is remarkable in her quote of Brandstetter’s wordings is that she often leaves out of her quote an adjective – “feigned” or “seeming” (“scheinbar” or “fingiert”) – that is however essential in the context of Brandstetter’s explanations. Without noting where exactly each of the quotes can be found, Rajewksi criticises the negative connotations of formulae such as “[the narrator’s] incapacity of coherent and suspenseful storytelling” (Brandstetter 2006, 234),238 “incorrect use of literary norms” (232) or “stylistic deficiency” (175) (quoted in German in Rajewski 2008, 329). She thereby provokes the impression that Brandstetter condemns the authors’ literary capacities and reproaches them with an unprofessional use of literary techniques. Although it is true that Brandstetter seems to be at least sceptical as to the literary value of the narrative strategies employed by the authors of the roman nouveau, this way of quoting distorts Brandstetter’s analysis. Brandstetter systematically speaks, throughout the entire book, about the “seeming incapacity of coherent and suspenseful storytelling” (“scheinbare Unfähigkeit kohärent und spannend zu berichten”, Brandstetter 2006, 234, emphasis mine; see also 176, 217) and the “exposed incorrect use of literary norms”

237 “[. . .] Echenoz and many others [. . .] practise an aesthetics of incoherence, which breaks with the valorisation of literary form. If literary form still takes the form of disautomatisation, the attitude that it reveals differs nonetheless significantly from the one that has been adopted by the modern aesthetics: where the latter destroys conventional language in order to find new poetic resources, while simultaneously occupying a superior position, these [new] authors remain voluntarily beneath [the norm of modern rupture], thus emphasising not only their distance from modern aesthetics, but also from what is a constitutive element of ‘the literature’” (Mecke 2010, 49, translation mine). 238 Here and hereafter translation mine.

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(“inszenierte unkorrekte Verwendung literarischer Normen”, 232, emphasis mine). “[S]tylistic deficiency” (175), finally, is the title of a chapter that is systematically and thematically subordinated to a chapter called “Feigned incompetence” (“Fingierte Inkompetenz”, 165, section 5.2.2, emphasis mine). Just like the word “inauthenticity”, these pre-posed adjectives, which are suppressed in Rajewski’s quotations, are of crucial importance since they stand for Brandstetter’s central hypothesis according to which the narrator intentionally constructs and exposes norm-deviant narrative structures (see 165, note 437; 169). The signs of incompetence are not ascribed to the author, but to the narrator as the “narrative instance” that “organises the story” (168). Brandstetter highlights the fact that this narrative instance exemplifies a high narrative “virtuosity” as well (see 168), which is mixed with an evidently non-conformist, schema-breaking use of literary techniques (see 168–169). Brandstetter supposes that this (intentionally performed) inconsistency on the level of narratorial behaviour and competence marks and exposes a (third-stair) distance towards earlier norms and forms of literary expression, especially towards the norm of literary innovation (see 106). “The exposure inheres, as a factor of definition, in all of the differentiated strategies”239 (233). My point is that there is a profound difference between saying that a novel uses “wrong perspectival constructions” (as Rajewski’s summarises Brandstetter through her quotes) and saying that a novel uses “seemingly wrong perspectival constructions” as part of an “aesthetics of stylistic inconsistency” (as Brandstetter does by referring to Mecke, see 165, note 437, emphasis mine). In other words, Brandstetter does not judge the novels as being constructed wrong, but analyses them with regard to the strategies that are consciously employed in order to create an impression of wrongness.240 Rajewski thus misunderstands Brandstetter’s analysis as negative literary criticism on the second interpretative stair, while it is a theoretical analysis that has to be located on the third interpretative stair. This misunderstanding also manifests itself in Rajewski’s claim that “judgments of this kind testify to a perspective that is obviously oriented towards the avant-garde ideal of the authenticity of 239 “Allen ausdifferenzierten Strategien ist die Inszenierung als definitorisches Moment inhärent” (Brandstetter 2006, 233). 240 Correspondingly, Brandstetter describes the aim of her study as follows: “The present study takes [a] structural understanding of inauthenticity as a starting point and will provide, through the development of strategies of exposed inauthenticity, the possibility of applying inauthenticity, as a purely formal-narrative, systematic category of analysis, to different novels” (“Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt an [einem] strukturellen Verständnis von Inauthentizität an und wird durch die Entwicklung von Strategien inszenierter Inauthentizität die Möglichkeit liefern, werkübergreifend die Inauthentizität als rein formal-narrative, systematische Analysekategorie anzuwenden”, Brandstetter 2006, 22, emphasis mine).

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high literature” (Rajewski 2008, 330, translation mine). According to my analysis, on the contrary, Brandstetter (who also moves within the historical staircase, as almost every interpreter does) does not stay on the second level nor does she simply claim a deviance from the norms of this level. Instead, she performs an interpretative ascent by interpreting these second-stair deviances as signs of a new, third-stair aesthetics, which marks its distances towards the second stair (through the volitional exposure of inconsistencies and dysfunctionalities). The consequence of this misunderstanding is that Rajewski argues on another (lower) level than Brandstetter, defending the well-known ‘both-first-andsecond-stair hypothesis’: It is precisely the possibility of exposing and of subverting [. . .] conventions that creates a space that allows the authors to tell stories yet, ‘with irony’ and all decidedly ‘without innocence’ – and that not only by necessity, but deliberately, with recourse to established narrative techniques, and far away from any naïve belief in an ‘unproblematic representability of reality’. (Rajewski 2008, 359, translation mine, orig. emphasis).

Rajewski’s analysis of “diaphanic narration” is based upon a combination of first- and second-stair elements: the “return to the story, hence to action, character and ‘readability’” (Rajewski 2008, 327, here and hereafter translation mine) is a first-level element (“récit d’un aventure”, 327), which draws on the realistic paradigm, whereas the “auto-reflective techniques” (359), “irony” (359) and “metanarrative” strategies (343) (“aventure d’un récit”, 327) are classical dimensions of the second stair. Additionally, Rajewski’s criticism of Mecke and Brandstetter is all the more confusing as her analysis seems to be largely inspired (and in concordance) with aspects of Mecke’s and Brandstetter’s studies. On the one hand, Rajewski largely draws on the exhibitory dimension of the respective novels – especially on the exposure of non-conformist kinds of focalisation (see 333, 336) –, which is one of the most central aspects of Brandstetter’s study (see Brandstetter 2006, 202; see also Mecke 2000, 418, note 47). On the other hand, Mecke discusses the novels’ exposure of their use of “inauthentic” strategies. In this context, he admits, in a way, that this exposure of inauthenticity is the place where the novels’ inauthenticity (and thus, as one might infer, Mecke’s own claim of aesthetic “inauthenticity”) comes to an end: “[. . .] the signs of the aesthetic lie [i.e. the signs of aesthetic ‘inauthenticity’, ESW], which the roman nouveau does not stop emitting, are perhaps the only [literary] form by which an aspiration for literary authenticity could survive [. . .]” (Mecke 2002, 112, translation mine). Insofar as Rajewski’s concept of “diaphanic narration” is primarily based upon exactly such a text-immanent (“meta-narrative”) exposure of non-conformist

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narrative strategies, there is thus an analytical overlap between Rajewski and Mecke (as well as Brandstetter). But there is also an interpretative gap that results from the fact that Mecke and Brandstetter decide for an interpretative ascent on the third stair (and Mecke, additionally, for a descent “under zero degrees”), which is not performed by Rajewski. According to my analysis, the source of these interpretative as well as judgmental differences are differences in the construction of coherence. It is not by chance that Brandstetter continuously works out “inconsistencies” and “incoherences” and that Mecke interprets formal deviances as an “aesthetics of incoherence” (Mecke 2010, 49). Mecke evaluates the novels’ literariness negatively because, in his view, they do not cohere with basic schematic requirements of literariness (see especially Mecke 2010, 41–42), including a second-stair “demolition” of first-stair literariness. In principle, Claudel’s negative evaluation of the (lacking) literariness of Faire l’amour – “clichés toujours donc!” (Claudel 2012, 136) – is geared towards the same point. If the novels are clichéd, then they do not cohere with the modern “norm of norm-breaking” (Mecke’s wording, see Brandstetter 2006, 33). But while Claudel interprets this incoherence as being located on the first stair (lack of avant-garde distance to established literary forms), Mecke performs an interpretative ascent from the second onto the third stair. Here, a problem arises. If every interpretative ascent implies a higherdegree coherence, and if the discovery or construction of coherence is, as a rule, connected with the claim of (a high degree of) literariness – how is it then possible that Mecke performs an interpretative ascent, but denies the novels their literariness? If Mecke qualifies the roman nouveau via an “aesthetics of incoherence” (Mecke 2010, 49), then the coherence produced by his interpretative ascent consists in postulating a coherent poetology (more precisely, a new “aesthetics”) according to which the authors wish to make an incoherent, “inauthentic” use of literary techniques. The lack of literariness postulated by Mecke is thus the result of a higher-degree incoherence insofar as the purported coherent poetology of the authors of the roman nouveau fails to cohere with (what Mecke considers as) “literary” poetology. When Rajewski, by contrast, proposes the new term of “diaphanic narration” and defines its characteristics (including perspectival incoherence), then she reads textual forms of incoherence in terms of a new “coherent” as well as “innovative” narrative strategy denoted by the new term. Both the finding of a coherence and of an innovative quality, bound to the identification of this new literary technique, allow her to ascribe literariness to these novels. Her interpretation of the techniques does not bring about an ascent onto the third interpretative

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stair since the purported innovative quality corresponds to poetological norms of the second stair (i.e. to the modern “norm of norm-breaking”). ⁘⁘⁘ The present chapter has proposed to analyse the specific narrativity of Toussaint’s novels in terms of narrative resistance. By using this term, I am drawing attention to the frequency with which researchers drop this key word in order to express their experience of Toussaint’s narrativity; this frequency hints to the intuitive acknowledgement of a certain negativity of these novels, which are designed to leave narrative expectations unsatisfied and to thwart efforts of meaningful interpretation. While others have tried to describe these qualities in terms of superficiality or “minimalist” properties, I have proposed to work with the notion of resistance itself. I therefore provided this notion with a more precise, narratological shape on the basis of a schema-theoretical approach. As a narratological dynamic that is located within the Pyramidal model of narrativity at the stage of narrativity in actualisation, I have conceptualised narrative resistance as specific processes of coherence in progress according to which textual narrative structures simultaneously activate narrative schemata (and schema slots) and refuse to comply with these schemata and schema slots. I have analysed the narrative resistance of Toussaint’s novels with regard to three schemata or, respectively, schema slots: tellability, functional dimensions of schemata and literariness. Concerning tellability, I have identified a refusal to comply with readerly expectations of tellability as a slot of the schema NARRATIVE. Since tellability is generally considered to refer to the narrated story, I have explored, in a first approach, the extent to which readers (more precisely, literary researchers) have pointed out that Toussaint’s novels deviate from default stories. Special emphasis has been given, on the one hand, to the non-hierarchical organisation of events. The analysis of this phenomenon in terms of the rhizomatic notion of ‘n-1’ (i.e. multiplicity without unity) has led to the detection of a subjacent isotopic network (or rhizome), which readers can detect and explore if they engage actively in processes of coherence in progress. The multiple connectivity between semantic nodes can be said to produce a narrative resistance against overarching macro schemata, which could provide the plot with resultative coherence. “Making love”, in Toussaint’s eponymous novel, thus amounts to “making rhizome”: the novel does not narrate events that correspond to the eponymous verbal concept, but explores the multiplicities (even inconsistencies) that are associated with love and making love as well as its various lines of flight (separation, violence, speechlessness, etc.). In other words, semantic dimensions that initially seem to be inconsistent in terms of conceptual knowledge structures are connected on an isotopic level so

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as to form a new “plane of consistency” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 9). The novels can thus be considered as a rhizomatic assemblage, i.e. “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 69). Insofar as this network transgresses the boundaries of particular novels in favour of a growing intertextual rhizome, novelistic meanings gain the quality of semantic becomings. Always new nodes and interconnections can be explored (rhizomatic “et” instead of “est”, see section 1.5), such that the novels can be said to use not a punctual, but an extended mode of tellability; not a prefabricated tellability, but, so to speak, a “tellability in progress”. This tellability, however, cannot be understood in traditional terms, as the rendering of intrinsically tellable events. If there is tellability, it should be conceived as a kind of “tellable” resistance against smooth narrative processing. Toussaint’s novels create this resistance in terms of non-hierarchical micro-events, schema-disruptive narrative contents, isotopic connectivity and semantic becomings. Narrative resistance is, however, not only a resistance against expectations and concepts that are connected to the schema NARRATIVE. According to my analysis, narrative elements of Toussaint’s novels also activate but fail to comply with various other conceptual schemata, more precisely, with the “function” (or “use”) slots of schemata. Toussaint’s narratives tend to present diegetic entities that are either used by the protagonist in “dysfunctional” ways (e.g. the darts) or presented by narratorial discourse in a way that contradicts encyclopaedic knowledge (e.g. the vomiting horse). Some scholars who have analysed the focalisation in Toussaint’s novels have made some observations that hint towards another form of resistance on the level of narrative composition. According to their analysis, Toussaint makes a dysfunctional use of focalisation strategies by paraleptically combining internal and zero focalisation. I have come to another conclusion according to which Toussaint makes consistent use of internal focalisation. The narrator protagonist turned out to be a storytelling narrator, someone who enriches diegetic factuality by means of counterfactual imaginations. The scenarios that he narrates surely blur the boundaries between fictional factuality and fictionality and between the intraand the hypodiegetic world; but considering questions of perspectival composition, there is no resistance in the narrower sense. Interestingly, the storytelling narrator and the novelistic forms of narrative resistance have something in common: they represent strategies of reappropriation. The storyteller’s imaginations aim to appropriate those parts of reality to himself that he can neither control nor access. Who is Marie’s new boyfriend? What did Marie do with him? The narrator protagonist does not resign himself to not knowing about these facts. His storytelling is a resistance against his lack of omniscience, against

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ontological restrictions, against the submission to reality – indeed a way of making reality his own again, be it only in terms of fiction. The narrative resistance of Toussaint’s novels serves, as I have argued, the same goal. Resistance against narrative tellability and other schematic-conceptual givens marks a strategy by which both narration and reality are reappropriated in favour of a subject that stands up to the literary challenges of the post-Nouveau-Roman era. Reappropriation by means of resistance thus replaces the much-discussed literary “return” of the subject, narration and the real. However, whether these strategies of reappropriation still represent a “literary” strategy or not is up to debate. This is hardly surprising if one takes into account that evaluations of literary quality are nothing but examinations of how well literary forms and functions comply with an established expectation, norm, that is, a schema of LITERARINESS. Literary narratives that truly live by narrative resistance will hardly spare the schema that concerns them the most. Instead of approaching the question of Toussaint’s literariness as a yes-no question, I have analysed the strategies that scholars employ in order to deal with Toussaint’s “resistant” literariness. Many scholars have been shown to draw on a traditional aesthetic criterion for literariness – namely the correspondence between form and content –in order to argue for (or against) Toussaint’s literariness. On the one hand, scholars make extensive use of blending strategies by which narrative elements, which are per se not meaningful, undergo an “interpretative ascent” and thereby gain (mostly a meta-fictional, poetological) meaning. On the other hand, scholars substantiate their literary judgments by connecting narrative features interpretatively to one or several of three historicalsystematic stages of French literature (which could be called authenticity, inauthenticity and exposed inauthenticity). However, insofar as Toussaint’s narratives cannot unambiguously be assigned to one of these three stairs of the “historical staircase of criticism”, they prove, again, to be resistant, even against the compliance with conceptual norms of literariness. Hence, narrativity, coherence (in progress) and literariness prove again to be highly interdependent.

Concluding remarks: Elements of a ‘Rhizomatic’ Realignment of ‘Narrativity’ and Narratology Un premier type de livre, c’est le live-racine. L’arbre est déjà l’image du monde, ou bien la racine est l’image du l’arbre-monde. C’est le livre classique, comme belle intériorité organique, signifiante et subjective [. . .]. Le livre imite [. . .] par des procédés qui lui sont propres, et qui mènent à bien ce que la nature ne peut pas [. . .] faire. La loi du livre, c’est [. . .] le Un qui devient deux. Comment la loi du livre serait-elle dans la nature, puisqu’elle préside à la division même entre monde et livre [. . .] ? [. . .] La nature n’agit pas ainsi: les racines ellesmêmes y sont pivotantes, à ramification plus nombreuse, latérale et circulaire, non pas dichotomique. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 11)1

This study has attempted not to be what Deleuze and Guattari call “the classical book”, that is, a book that projects its proper orders, its dichotomies and clear-cut categories and oppositions onto the objects that it allegedly “represents”. Instead, this study has made an effort to lay bare and to explore the dynamic complexities and subtle connections that constitute its object of research (narrativity), that link its object of research to various (interpretative, literary-historical, theoretical, epistemic, etc.) contexts and that exist between its object of research and itself. This is why this study does not simply define narrativity. A definition works towards boundaries and clear-cut distinctions, but, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “[n]ature doesn’t work that way”; the nature of narrative is more complex than that; it is this complexity that the present study has sought to explore by means of a ‘rhizomatic’ approach. Figure 22 below is an attempt to map out the essential elements of the ‘rhizomatic’ network of connections that I have argued to be relevant to the notion of narrativity. To give a very short overview in this network, we find at the centre of this network narrative objects, because they are, in their diversity, the starting point of each and any narratological interest and activity and, moreover, the concrete entities in which narrativity manifests itself (or, conversely, the entities from which narrativity as an abstract quality can be extrapolated). Narrative

1 “A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority [. . .]. The book imitates [. . .] by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot [. . .] do. The law of the book is [. . .] the One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book [. . .]? [. . .] Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 5). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-008

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Figure 22: Elements of a rhizomatic realignment.

objects emerge from a combination of narrative elements and dimensions; so does narrativity as a felt quality (or as a judgment on the “narrativehood” or “narrativeness” of a narrative object). The narrativity of a crime story, for instance, lives by another combination of elements than a surrealist novel. Experiences of (and judgments on) narrativity, as they are made by different readers in their interpretative interaction with a narrative, rely on a specific interconnection of different (textual, reader-specific and contextual) parameters as well. Narrativity is thus less a stable quality than a conceptual task that narratologists have tried to accomplish by means of definition. The very diversity of (and competition between) the innumerable definitions of narrative or narrativity, however, obscure rather than clarify the notion of narrativity and this obscurity is reinforced by other factors: definitions are influenced by the epistemological orientation of scholars; they are interdependent with the kind of narratology that scholars advocate and with the corpus of narratives that forms the basis of the scholars’ theoretical reflections; definitions are also dependent on subjective judgments about what is essential for or found in a (good) narrative; moreover, narratives – especially literary narratives – metamorphose over time and so do interpretations of and quality judgments on them, the

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epistemological orientations2 of authors, recipients and scientists, definitions of narrativity and the narratological field itself. Given that networks do not have a linear shape and that books, by contrast, require a linear structure, the present study has performed a kind of parcours through this network. In a nutshell, this written trajectory began, in Part A, at the epistemological node, passed then to the node of narrativity and finally elaborated on a particular narrative dimension (coherence). Part B of this study has focussed on the connection between narrativity and literary narratives (as a subset of existing narrative objects), which implied a discussion on the interconnections between them and the nodes of coherence (as one of the narrative dimensions), of literary interpretation and of quality judgments. The considerable challenge with which this study has been confronted was to develop a model that neither neglects the complexity of this dynamic network nor misses the aim of developing an order that would allow the conceptual chaos that currently constitutes the notion of narrativity to be reduced. This was clearly a ‘rhizomatic’ epistemological challenge inasmuch as an oversimplifying order – for instance, the classification of opposed paradigms of narrativity theories – would correspond to an ‘arborescent’ way of thinking and thus to a particular (subjective, relative) epistemology, while a mere running through the network – that is, the directionless and inconclusive movement through its various nodes and connections – would mean falling into the other extreme, a disordered and nonconstructive way of thinking that would lose track of the very goal of scientific theories: that of producing an order that is adequate to the object of research. In other words, the insights that we have gained in chapter 3 on the functioning of the human mind and on the need of the latter to create coherent conceptual structures, applies not only to our object of research (i.e., to the creation of narrative orders), but also to ourselves, that is, to the level of research: also narratological knowledge is stored in schemata, which, for their part, are structured per definitionem, and an approach that fails to provide structure cannot be adequately cognitively stored as knowledge. Nonetheless, structures tend to be static; how could static structures represent adequately a dynamic object? This epistemological challenge is at the bottom not only of this study, but of the narratology of today, which does see the restrictions of classical, ‘structuralist’ models, but does not know what could possibly replace them without destroying narratology’s own ‘roots’.

2 One might think here of Kuhn’s (1996) claims concerning the occurrence of “paradigm shifts”.

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The solution that this study offers consists of the development of a ‘rhizomatic’ model – the so-called Pyramid of narrativity –, which combines, like the ‘rhizome’, structure with dynamism. It therefore resembles what Prigogine calls a “dissipative” structure, that is, a structure that lives both by “continual flow” and by “structural stability”. One of the simplest structures of this kind is a vortex in flowing water – for example, a whirlpool in a bathtub. Water continuously flows through the vortex, yet its characteristic shape, the well-known spirals and narrowing funnel, remains remarkably stable [. . .]. It is a dissipative structure. (Capra 1996, 169)

On the one hand, the Pyramid is “structurally stable” inasmuch as it maps out four batched stages of narrativity, which ascribe a fixed place to specific narrative dimensions and processes. On the other hand, the Pyramid lives by a “continual flow” insofar as narrativity, in the full sense, is present in neither part of this structure, but emerges only from the dynamics of narrative processing, which alone bring (the different stages of) the Pyramid into being. Moreover, these dynamics are themselves implied in larger “continual flows”, which are represented in my model (see figure 6) by the Pyramid’s resting on an anthropological (un)ground of narrative conventions, practices and traditions and by the Pyramid’s embeddedness in further contexts, which influence its internal dynamics.3 One of the most important advantages of the Pyramid is its integrative (or meta-narratological) impetus: instead of replacing (and devaluating) older conceptions of narrativity, the Pyramid serves to integrate them in an all-encompassing, “virtual” model, which provides space for all possible narrative dimensions that have alternatively been highlighted by different theories. The Pyramid thus provides a theoretical model that can account for the emergence of the most various narrative forms, functions, processes and meanings, understood as the ongoing operations of a network in which various textual features and readerly factors interact with each other. A second added value of the Pyramid consists, from my point of view, of the fact that it overcomes the illusory separation not only between the narrative text and the reader, but also between narrativity (understood as an essential experiential quality), narratological concepts or definitions of narrativity and narratology (see the respective interconnections in Figure 22). Considering this interplay, the Pyramid, as a “dissipative” structure, provides the notion of narrativity with

3 Embedding the Pyramid into larger contexts and flows corresponds to an epistemological bias, characteristic of this study, namely “systems thinking”. As Capra notes, a “key criterion of systems thinking is the ability to shift one’s attention back and forth between systems levels. Throughout the living world we find systems nesting within other systems” (1996, 37).

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a dynamic order, which integrates both the text and the reader; secondly, the Pyramid is itself not a definition, but a model of narrativity, albeit one that transforms the diachronically growing “tower” of competing definitions into a “flat”, systematic, all-encompassing space of narrative possibilities; thirdly, insofar as this model of narrative factors, dynamics and possibilities is designed to provide space for (and is susceptible to locating) all kinds of narratological conceptions, research interests and priorities, the Pyramid functions also as a map of the narratological landscape that helps narratology (with its various branches and activities) to orient itself by means of the narratological reference points that the internal structure of the Pyramid offers. A third advantage of the Pyramid is the fact that it emphasises the dynamic side of narrative coherence (here called coherence in progress), a factor of narrativity that has thus far been neglected in definitions of narrativity. This factor is highlighted and systematically integrated into the notion of narrativity through one of the four stages of the Pyramid (narrativity in actualisation). Simultaneously, the Pyramid avoids overemphasising this stage of narrativity by integrating its counterpart, characterised by resultative coherence, as well (namely on the higher stage of resultative narrativity). Narrativity in actualisation is the stage that can take account of the processes of coherence in progress that develop at the text-reader nexus. This study has substantiated its claims on the ‘rhizomatic’ nature of these processes by transdisciplinary insights into the nature of coherence, as they have been presented by text linguistics, discourse linguistics, cognitive theory and literary theory. Given that these processes of coherence in progress develop between particular texts (i.e., idiosyncratic textual systems) and individual readers (i.e. individualised cognitiveaffective systems of “experientiality”), the concrete narrativity that instantiates itself (like a dissipative structure) on the stage of narrativity in actualisation must be highly subjective and specific. This leads to a narratological shift of focus: away from the generic question of what characterises each and every narrative (from a generic point of view), which the Pyramid answers only in terms of its dissipative structure, towards the analysis of specific narrativities, that is, to the variety of specific instantiations of pyramidal narrativity. This shift of focus can be considered to be the fourth advantage of this study inasmuch as it opens a new paradigm of narratological analysis – research on narrative dynamics –, which can lead narratology out of its major impasse: the self-imposed restriction to the refinement and enlargement of a narratological “toolbox”. By integrating the analysis of concrete and specific narrative dynamics into the narratological space, this study bridges the gap between abstract theory and concrete interpretation and makes the space between them accessible to narrative analysis. It thereby also works against the wide-spread tendency among narratological

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scholars to exemplify their abstract theoretical claims by reference to literary texts without discussion of the interpretative research literature. I consider this to be a harmful tendency since the analysis of the theorist him- or herself is in such cases prioritised at the expense of alternative readings and analyses that can be found in the interpretative research literature. A fifth added value of the study can be found in the fact that it not only introduces the notion of narrative dynamics as a new paradigm of analysis from a (meta-)narratological point of view, but also showcases its usefulness for the concrete analysis of literary narrativities through the identification of three kinds of narrative dynamics: narrative projection, narrative withdrawal and narrative resistance. These dynamics, which are analysed primarily on the basis of the interpretative approaches of literary scholars, provide new insights into the narrative mechanisms that underlie the specific textual qualities and effects of reception of the respective novels (i.e. from Choderlos de Laclos, Franz Kafka and Jean-Philippe Toussaint). Narrative projection provides a narratological analysis of the ambiguity of Les Liaisons dangereuses, especially of perspectival ambiguity. Narrative withdrawal allows, from a narratological point of view, the “Kafkaesque” quality of Das Schloss to be analysed. It can be seen as an effect of reception that relies on the highly elaborated, most probably intentional creation of various textual-cognitive inconsistencies. Narrative resistance, for its part, substantiates, from a narratological point of view, the frequent description of Toussaint’s novels as somehow “resistant” and explains both this “resistance” and Toussaint’s partly controversial “literary” status by an analysis of the ways in which the novels make deviant use of cognitive schemata (and especially of the schema NARRATIVE itself). There is, however, also a number of questions that arise from this study and that are related especially to the introduction of the notion of narrative dynamics. First of all, how many other dynamics could eventually be found by means of narratological analysis? In other words, shall we conceive of narrative dynamics as a limited set that narratology could detect and theorise little by little or is it rather an infinite set of author- or even novel-specific dynamics, which is as encompassing as the number of existing novels? As my analyses in Part B suggest, I understand narrative dynamics as theoretically abstracted forms of text-reader interaction whose analytical utility should transcend the scope of a single literary work or author. That is, each narrative dynamic should, as an analytical category, be general enough to be in principle identifiable in the works (and interpretive effects) of different authors. I thus suppose that the label of narrative dynamics refers to a limited set of text-reader interactions; nonetheless, given that narratives and their reception undergo continuously historical changes, this paradigm is simultaneously open for new, “emerging” dynamics.

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But how could we guarantee that the label of narrative dynamics is not misunderstood and misused for the development of pseudo-narratological labels that cover overly specific, idiosyncratic interpretations? This study has worked against this tendency by employing universal tools of analysis from cognitive linguistics, primarily from schema theory and blending theory. The overfilling of conceptual slots (narrative projection) and the resistance against adequate schema use (narrative resistance) represent quite general possibilities of how narrative texts could provoke readers to negotiate knowledge structures. The analysis of Kafka’s dynamics of withdrawal is, in this regard, exceptional; it does not draw on schema theory or blending theory, but rather lays bare inconsistencies on the level of logical thinking (e.g. contradictions or inversions). Which theories could be used to substantiate the analysis of such violations of logical principles? This is a question that future research should explore. Also the narrative dynamics of gap-filling, on which I have repeatedly elaborated throughout Part A of this study, requires some clarification, given that this label covers different kinds of text-reader interaction: top-down supply of missing information, even on a narrative micro-level (via the activation of cognitive scripts) versus curiosity- or suspense-driven anticipation or retarded completion of a narrative macro-pattern. This brings us to a further question, which is even more urgent. Which level of narrative-cognitive interactions is concerned with narrative dynamics: those that are constitutive of the narrative as a whole (macro-level gestalt) or also those that concern particular micro-problems of processing? Given that the Pyramid covers all levels of narrative processing, it is in principle possible to identify dynamics on both micro- and macro-levels. This study, however, has primarily been interested in large-scale techniques and meaning effects of the novels under consideration, although this implies, of course, also the analysis of textual microlevel phenomena. Further investigations should work towards a system of classification that allows distinguishing conceptually and terminologically between narrative dynamics on micro- versus macro-levels of processing; but they should also explore problems associated with such a dichotomic classification. All in all, narrative dynamics might provide a useful paradigm for the analysis of larger literary tendencies. Do literary-historical classifications, for instance groupings of authors according to epochs, overlap with preferences for certain kinds of literary dynamics? Do authors have preferences for specific narrative dynamics (and why?) or do they use different dynamics interchangeably? Are the works of authors (i.e. the entirety of their literary productions) rather homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of narrative dynamics used? Does the identification of narrative dynamics allow for the trans-epochal grouping of

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Concluding remarks: Elements of a ‘Rhizomatic’ Realignment

authors and thus for the discovery of hitherto undetected similarities (or differences) between them? As these questions show, this study has opened up, by the introduction of the notion of narrative dynamics, an area of narratological research that calls for future investigation. All in all, in view of the disorder that currently governs both narratology and the notion of narrativity, this study hopes to provide the crucial elements for a ‘rhizomatic’ narratological realignment that works against the profusion of disconnected and rivalling theories and definitions, against the normative exclusion of selected narrative forms or dimensions and for a self-reflective, epistemic reorientation and consolidation under the aegis of the ‘rhizomatic’ Pyramid of narrativity.

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Table of Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4

Figure 5 Figure 6a Figure 6b Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15

Figure 16 Figure 17

Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20 Figure 21 Figure 22

The three irreducibilities of the semiotic circle (epistemic relativity) 32 The Babylonian Tower of definitions 77 Correspondences between Greimas’s actantial model and his model of transformation 130 The canonical narrative schema (adapted from Courté’s Analyse sémiotique du discours: De l’énoncé à l’énonciation, ©1991 Hachette Supérieur, 100) 132 Fludernik’s (1996, 50) conception of narrativity 154 The Pyramid of narrativity 180 Rhizomatic dynamics of the Pyramid of narrativity 187 Blending: The Network Model (Basic Diagram from Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 46) 261 Non-ambiguousness (left side) versus ambiguity (right side) 304 Event ambiguity 312 Plot ambiguity in terms of counterfactuality/virtuality (simplified: punctual divergence of plot lines) 315 The ambiguity of functional polyvalence (simplified) 317 The ambiguity of simultaneous split-page discourse 319 Hypertextual ambiguity: Genette’s “palimpsest” 321 Narrative projection: overfilled conceptual slots 333 Network of (the most important) voices in Les Liaisons dangereuses, completed by semantico-ideological axes (following Moravetz 1990, 109–131, 217–244) 338 Narrative projection of viewpoints in letter XLVIII (viewpoint of outerdiegetic readers) 371 Zoom into the narrative projection of viewpoints of letter XLVIII: contrasts and correspondences between components of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s viewpoints 373 Zoom into the narrative projection of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s viewpoints: contrasts between the poetic functions of the letter 383 Narrative Projection of two “topic” subframes, based on Warning (2007) 396 Semantic network connections in Faire l’amour 536 Blending Network of La Salle de bain 547 Elements of a rhizomatic realignment 602

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-010

Index actantial model 128, 129, 130 actualisation 68, 100, 121, 131, 132, 154, 166, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 193, 195, 197, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210, 215, 220, 226, 231, 232, 234, 235, 245, 249, 250, 251, 252, 265, 270, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 292, 312, 401, 407, 411, 441, 458, 463, 480, 497, 506, 534, 598, 605 ambiguity 9, 52, 120, 121, 161, 168, 196, 198, 232, 233, 282, 284, 290, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 338, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 352, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 368, 369, 371, 379, 383, 384, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390, 392, 398, 399, 413, 421, 434, 441, 451, 489, 510, 520, 534, 590, 606 antenarrative 142, 143, 144, 149, 525 antimimetic 17, 26, 97, 98, 99, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 156, 157, 176, 197, 198, 225, 226, 416 antinarrative 4, 15, 144, 157, 425, 428 assemblage 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 48, 52, 173, 266, 487, 525, 599 becoming 23, 41, 56, 64, 65, 66, 67, 115, 159, 163, 209, 213, 220, 244, 265, 329, 398, 418, 583 betweenness 39, 42, 44, 45, 51, 62, 266, 344, 445 blank 202, 273, 397, 476 blend 140, 141, 171, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 268, 269, 270, 284, 388, 392, 405, 547, 576, 577, 579 blended space 260, 261, 262, 263, 267, 268, 326, 389, 548 blending 10, 56, 76, 139, 140, 141, 142, 152, 165, 171, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 277, 290, 301, 302, 303, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110673180-011

320, 324, 326, 327, 368, 369, 386, 387, 388, 389, 409, 506, 507, 516, 549, 551, 571, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 580, 600, 607 causality 10, 56, 87, 120, 146, 188, 191, 195, 231, 246, 249, 250, 253, 263, 278, 335, 350, 401, 413, 414, 433, 434, 438, 494, 495, 525, 526 coherence in progress 8, 9, 10, 138, 185, 193, 226, 244, 252, 254, 272, 273, 274, 276, 280, 281, 282, 285, 300, 313, 317, 322, 323, 324, 331, 335, 338, 343, 360, 362, 366, 386, 399, 411, 441, 444, 450, 456, 470, 471, 476, 479, 480, 493, 495, 497, 505, 506, 514, 524, 534, 535, 538, 541, 569, 576, 598, 605 cohesion 97, 136, 137, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 253, 438, 511 connectivity 42, 50, 51, 52, 82, 208, 229, 231, 251, 258, 272, 273, 290, 339, 518, 529, 538, 541, 545, 598 consistency 43, 51, 60, 97, 152, 185, 189, 197, 271, 272, 303, 349, 414, 441, 445, 447, 457, 470, 472, 480, 485, 494, 497, 498, 507, 599 construction-integration 245, 246 contradiction 51, 297, 398, 448, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 466, 489, 569 curiosity 74, 80, 87, 89, 122, 183, 194, 201, 430, 435, 436, 437, 442, 607 deconstruction 29, 30, 33, 44, 50, 55, 348 deliterarisation 583, 593 deterritorialization 42, 45, 49, 50, 53, 142, 266, 290, 445, 479 dual coding theory 171, 255–259 elementary sequence 118, 131, 172, 180 emergence 5, 45, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 175, 178, 191, 205, 206, 209, 214, 231, 232, 234, 265, 267, 322, 326, 387, 397, 526, 528, 569, 604

636

Index

emplotment 10, 53, 79, 82, 83, 84, 109, 112, 113, 135, 142, 166, 184, 207, 218, 290, 291, 425, 430, 431, 432, 433, 435, 437, 438, 494, 495, 496, 533 enactment 85, 205 event 43, 52, 58, 72, 73, 74, 80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 93, 94, 98, 103, 118, 119, 125, 141, 145, 149, 181, 182, 223, 224, 229, 235, 242, 243, 249, 262, 263, 277, 280, 305, 309, 310, 311, 312, 316, 317, 322, 323, 326, 332, 359, 367, 368, 374, 391, 392, 398, 400, 406, 416, 417, 427, 429, 431, 460, 521, 523, 539, 552, 563 eventfulness 10, 16, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86, 93, 94, 97, 103, 117, 131, 132, 133, 166, 222, 223, 224, 308, 427, 438, 494, 502, 505, 511, 525, 539, 575, 577 event-indexing model 250 experientiality 24, 31, 73, 81, 82, 88, 93, 94, 95, 98, 103, 107, 120, 121, 126, 131, 145, 153, 154, 158, 188, 201, 202, 203, 206, 222, 228, 231, 348, 403, 415, 521, 557, 605 flux 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 39, 74, 89, 121, 125, 203, 266, 509, 536 focalisation 10, 27, 36, 134, 305, 308, 310, 311, 358, 359, 360, 409, 413, 425, 446, 496, 531, 538, 553, 554, 555, 556, 558, 562, 564, 565, 575, 592, 596, 599 focalization see focalisation hybridity 134, 567, 586 impassibilité 500 inauthenticity 554, 567, 581, 582, 583, 585, 590, 592, 595, 596, 600 incoherence 11, 29, 66, 68, 149, 152, 298, 481, 515, 571, 573, 593, 594, 597 intentionality 87, 120, 140, 155, 195, 201, 230, 249, 250, 263, 406, 413, 414, 495, 550 interpretative ascent 186, 196, 251, 351, 481, 497, 505, 507, 569, 573, 574, 577, 579, 580, 581, 582, 587, 588, 589, 590, 592, 596, 597, 600

irony 213, 342, 510, 511, 567, 568, 581, 582, 583, 587, 589, 590, 591, 592, 596 Kafkaesque 11, 292, 400, 415, 416, 442, 445, 457, 458, 485, 486, 493, 496, 497, 606 landscape model 246, 272 literariness 8, 9, 11, 52, 106, 112, 124, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 168, 198, 214, 275, 280, 281, 283, 284, 292, 298, 300, 302, 328, 329, 330, 350, 356, 363, 384, 385, 390, 419, 496, 505, 507, 519, 521, 522, 567, 571, 572, 574, 576, 580, 588, 592, 594, 597, 598, 600 mental space 260, 265, 266, 267, 364, 365 metaphor 44, 48, 62, 75, 80, 164, 170, 175, 185, 187, 228, 229, 259, 267, 312, 324, 356, 358, 368, 375, 384, 386, 388, 389, 393, 445, 467, 489, 492, 505, 515, 516, 517, 576, 577, 588 mimesis 16, 104, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 135, 143, 152, 157, 169, 172, 173, 197 minimalism 500, 527, 571, 575 model of transformation 129, 130 multiperspectivity 52, 270, 290, 335, 352, 358, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 386, 387, 389, 390 multiplicity without unity 43, 46, 51, 53, 290, 598 n-1 42, 43, 45, 46, 51, 53, 290, 343, 472, 518, 524, 528, 529, 540, 598 narrateme 73, 120, 121, 203, 230 narrative function 181, 317 narrative meaning 158, 182, 186, 189, 199, 200, 204, 206, 214, 219, 234, 247, 252, 259, 268, 447, 526, 527 narrative space 30, 139, 140, 291, 310, 366 narrativisation 33, 93, 118, 126, 136, 137, 145, 149, 154, 155, 210, 216, 225, 279, 306 narrativization see narrativisation naturalisation 33, 136, 137, 268, 306 negative capability 282, 299, 300, 484

Index

palimpsest 75, 284, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 332, 390 paradigmatic 33, 34, 35, 36, 52, 84, 113, 114, 130, 132, 133, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 184, 189, 197, 216, 309, 317, 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 362, 368, 370, 382, 386, 387, 389, 393, 395, 397, 398, 399, 437, 438, 492, 498, 537 performativity 154, 172, 485, 487, 494, 497 playfulness 464, 487, 495, 567, 584 poetic function 164, 302, 328, 329, 330, 331, 379, 382, 383, 384 polyperspectivity 337, 367, 373, 436 polyphony 52, 59, 143, 284, 335, 342, 343, 344, 474 postliterary 567, 593 principle of zoomability 182, 188, 190, 192, 220, 256 projection 9, 164, 261, 263, 264, 290, 291, 295, 312, 314, 325, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 352, 370, 371, 372, 373, 379, 383, 384, 386, 389, 390, 392, 393, 394, 395, 398, 399, 405, 420, 513, 534, 535, 538, 606, 607 realism 17, 47, 114, 567, 584, 585, 587, 592 reception-oriented 19, 153, 207, 219, 221, 297, 338 refreshment 281, 568 resistance 11, 55, 112, 129, 186, 251, 279, 290, 291, 347, 349, 351, 374, 376, 377, 382, 393, 420, 439, 442, 446, 451, 475, 499, 501, 502, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 524, 525, 530, 538, 540, 546, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 556, 564, 565, 567, 568, 569, 570, 598, 599, 600, 606, 607 resultative coherence 138, 167, 174, 199, 251, 252, 272, 276, 284, 290, 313, 317, 322, 323, 324, 335, 361, 387, 388, 415, 441, 458, 497, 506, 507, 527, 571, 598, 605 resultative narrativity 62, 68, 136, 180, 183, 185, 186, 189, 195, 197, 203, 204, 206, 209, 226, 232, 235, 246,

637

249, 251, 252, 265, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 292, 441, 442, 605 rhizome 5, 6, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 69, 90, 91, 141, 143, 173, 174, 177, 179, 191, 192, 221, 227, 265, 290, 342, 343, 351, 352, 432, 450, 472, 492, 518, 529, 535, 538, 540, 544, 566, 598, 604 roman nouveau 500, 575, 593, 594, 596, 597 semiosphere 31, 34, 37, 115, 163, 188, 217 sequence 16, 22, 55, 74, 78, 85, 87, 92, 93, 95, 99, 106, 118, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 143, 151, 155, 164, 166, 167, 168, 181, 182, 184, 194, 201, 211, 212, 240, 247, 295, 313, 329, 330, 331, 350, 379, 382, 393, 416, 417, 495, 520, 524, 527, 539 sequentiality 1, 25, 56, 80, 82, 92, 106, 164, 171, 184, 228, 314, 393 situation model 197, 233, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 258, 265, 277, 280, 285, 305, 370, 387 storyworld 71, 74, 89, 94, 101, 125, 133, 151, 155, 200, 225, 233, 234, 276, 278, 285, 291, 399, 416, 509, 525, 529, 538, 548, 553, 557, 561, 563 structure building framework 245, 248, 249, 251 surprise 4, 50, 74, 80, 87, 89, 122, 136, 183, 186, 194, 201, 270, 425, 435, 436, 437, 438, 446, 447, 477, 488, 521, 562, 571, 590 syntagmatic 34, 35, 36, 52, 110, 130, 131, 132, 146, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 184, 189, 195, 197, 216, 275, 309, 317, 329, 330, 331, 334, 362, 368, 370, 379, 382, 386, 387, 389, 399, 414, 432, 437, 438, 495, 529 systems thinking 4, 5, 47, 49, 188, 192, 228, 604 teleology 10, 53, 74, 87, 89, 120, 121, 133, 166, 167, 217, 430, 431, 438, 514, 525, 529

638

Index

tellability 11, 53, 73, 79, 82, 103, 124, 133, 136, 156, 157, 173, 223, 234, 235, 291, 313, 315, 316, 318, 323, 427, 432, 506, 514, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 538, 539, 540, 546, 569, 598, 600

211, 215, 220, 221, 226, 278, 281, 285, 441, 442 virtuality 35, 65, 66, 68, 82, 94, 102, 103, 132, 153, 178, 181, 182, 185, 190, 220, 272, 313, 314, 315, 326, 327, 339, 437, 524, 533

unground 64, 66, 210, 212, 213 unnatural 17, 26, 106, 114, 115, 146, 148, 152, 156, 157, 169, 225, 226, 416

withdrawal 10, 53, 197, 290, 291, 405, 421, 434, 439, 440, 441, 445, 447, 449, 457, 458, 459, 466, 470, 473, 477, 480, 483, 486, 487, 493, 494, 496, 497, 498, 520, 529, 606, 607

virtual narrativity 68, 180, 182, 186, 190, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210,